


Better Natures

by etirabys



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Dom/sub, F/M, Fake Marriage, Post-Season 2, Zombie Apocalypse, mentions of human trafficking, mentions of rape (of side characters)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-05-31 13:22:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6471604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etirabys/pseuds/etirabys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Work with me here, Frank,” Karen snapped. “Make some sense here. Talk to me. We can’t figure out what our next move is until you explain why you’re so disgusted at the thought of my being attracted to you — an attraction which, by the way, I’ve never let interfere with our work or our friendship —“</p><p>“I’m not disgusted,” Frank said in a strained, calm voice. “You have ghastly taste, but I’m not disgusted. No. It’s just the feeling of having carried a torch for miles and miles in the dark and... having the sun come up.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

It was weird how Karen had spent days and weeks agonizing over the ‘big’ life decisions. Whether to dump a cheating boyfriend. Which college to choose. Whether to move to another city. But the real earth-shaking choices, the ones that defined her, seemed to take place in a handful of heartbeats. The yank of a steering wheel and the clamor of glass — the lunge for a small black handgun on a table — and this.

::::

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

Frank had knocked on her door, not broken in. He was carrying three duffel bags in one hand, all menacingly deformed; in the other he held a leash. It was connected to the collar of a dark gray dog whose tongue lolled out as it looked up at Karen. Its tail was wagging furiously, clearly wanting to approach her, but held in place by discipline.

She had looked from Frank’s stony face to the dog’s shining eyes and said, “Come in.”

The slope of his shoulders loosened, and he obeyed. When he did, Karen had seen that he was also wearing a fat camping backpack. A nervous laugh escaped her. “You look like you’re carrying everything you own.”

“I am,” he’d said. And then he asked the question.

“I trust you absolutely for certain things,” Karen said, after a pause. “For others not at all.”

Frank’s face was a mask. “But do you trust that I’d give a whole lot to keep you safe, to keep you alive?”

Karen remembered hitting the floor as bullets split the air above her. Frank’s elbow had dug into the flesh of her arm, his jaw had knocked into the crown of her head. “Yes. I do. Frank, what’s going on?”

“I’m asking you to drop everything and come with me for a while,” he said. Finally she saw a trace of feeling under his face. It looked like fear. “I know it sounds like crazy stupid crap coming from a crazy stupid man, but I swear, Karen, something’s coming and I’m not sure what it is. It may be nothing but if it’s not, New York’s going to be the last place you want to be —“

“Okay,” she said, cutting him off. “Give me fifteen minutes to pack.”

:::::

They loaded everything into Ben Urich’s old car. (“My last one blew up, we’ll have to use yours,” said Frank.) Karen started driving at around 8pm. Around midnight Frank said, “I’ll take over. Go to sleep. Max can take the front seat.”

When she woke up, they were in a small town named Logran, West Virginia.

:::::

They checked in at a small inn. Frank went to sleep immediately after feeding his dog, telling her to wake him up if anything happened.

Karen looked down at him ruefully. She hadn’t been able to shake answers out of him while driving last night — he’d cryptically said, “Give me five days. Just five days. If nothing’s happened in five days, there’s no bad news, we go back, I say sorry a couple times, and you won’t see me again.”

“I do have a life, you know,” she’d said.

“Good thing you’re between jobs.”

She’d started in outrage, turning her head briefly. The lines of his profile had gone a little guilty. “I’ve just been keeping an ear out, know how you’ve been doing. That’s all.”

There hadn’t been much conversation after that — Karen hadn't asked what he’d been doing since she’d last seen him, and he hadn't seemed inclined to chat.

She took Max and went downstairs to see if there was anywhere she could get breakfast. She didn’t linger, returning to the room as soon as possible — it was a little ridiculous, but she didn’t like the idea of Frank, once the most wanted man in America, being left alone sleeping. She ate a scone and drank her coffee in the room, reading the news on her computer, as the sun inched across the sky.

The days passed uneventfully. On the second day they took Max to a nearby state park and ambled around for the entire day. On the third Karen got a call from Foggy, and dissembled when he asked where she was, telling him she was with family. He happily rambled about his first case at HC&B upon prompting, and after a conversation of careful redirection Karen hung up, feeling drained and ashamed. More lies. More divergence from the person she wanted to be, the life she wanted to have.

It didn’t occur to her to warn Foggy of anything; the three days in Logran had been boring but idyllic, with nothing noteworthy in the news except a plane crash in the Mediterranean and a new kind of superflu spreading in China. She had already chalked everything up to Frank’s paranoia, and would have insisted on returning if it weren’t for the fact that… well, she was actually kind of enjoying her vacation. Logran was a boring town, but boring wasn’t always bad. She liked walking Max with Frank trailing behind her (looking for threats that never materialized). She liked the sprawl of green trees, the easy parking, the clean air. She liked settling into sleep and hearing Frank’s breathing in the other bed, punctuated by the occasional snore of the dog.

The tension and adrenaline of the night she’d left New York, already surreal, began to seem a little laughable. Frank himself had started to look sheepish and self-deprecating.

On the fourth night, Karen turned on the radio while Frank was driving back from the diner where they’d just had excellent quesadillas, and heard that dozens of hospitals across the nation had just been placed under quarantine. Four were in New York. “…not a flu virus,” the dashboard crackled at her. “Hospitals all over the country have been receiving an influx of flu patients — of course, it’s the season for it, but a fraction of these patients seem to be devolving into a violent delirium, and have been filmed attacking their nurses or family. Such a video was leaked earlier today, prompting several others like it over the country to receive increased attention…”

“Zombies,” Frank said, and Karen snorted, thinking it was a joke.

“Treatment is uncertain, but thankfully the disease doesn’t seem to be lethal — all patients, while not lucid, are being held for observation in hospitals across the country. Some experts are worrying that this is a new prion disease, but this is unlikely to be the case, as the transmissibility of this condition fits that of the common flu. The CDC has just released a statement that affected patients should be calmly but thoroughly restrained and brought to a list of designated hospitals, which are listed in full on their web page, at…”

“They’re lying.” Frank’s voice was curt.

“What?”

“…people experiencing high fever and tremors should also go to these designated centers, as well as those who were in contact with the blood and saliva of affected patients. Remember not to panic: the disease is not fatal, and there is a report that a patient in New Mexico has made a complete recovery.”

The radio jockey moved onto sports, and Karen turned off the radio. “Frank, what’s happening?”

“The night I came to get you,” Frank said, “I was after this sleazebag who was involved in human trafficking. He’d come back earlier that week from Thailand, had a little girl with him. Kept her locked up in his bedroom, she was gagged because she wouldn’t stop making noise.”

Karen felt sick. “Did you —“

“Went to get her, yeah,” Frank said softly. “Watched him for two days making sure there wasn’t anyone else. Wasn’t sure if there weren’t other kids, locked up somewhere no one knew about, starve to death if I got him straightaway. But there wasn’t. So that night I followed him into his house, kicked down the bedroom door, guns blazing, all that…”

He pulled into the lot of the inn and parked. Neither of them got out of the car. Karen’s hands were knotted up in her lap as she waited for Frank to continue.

“The kid, her hands were tied together still. She was on the bed, so was the scumbag, he’d moved her to rape her I guess. The gag was on the floor and the man was already dead. His guts were all out over the sheets. And she was eating it off the bed.”

Karen glanced down at her knuckles — they were white.

“Didn’t know what to do.” Frank shrugged. “When she saw me she tried to get at me, except she was still sort of tied up and she just ended up on the floor kicking and wiggling. She was making these noises. Like croaks or groans. I bugged out. It was the creepiest fucking shit I’ve seen since… not the scariest, or the most violent, but. Didn’t know what to do. Called the cops, pretended to be a hooker the guy had called over, just told them what I’d seen. They told me to stay on the scene. Told them I would, then I bailed. Watched from the roof of the building over to see if they got that kid out okay. But it wasn’t the police or an ambulance that came, it was people in yellow hazmat suits. They were in and out in thirty minutes, carried both of them out in stretchers. I went down later, pretended to be a rubbernecker, and found out everyone in the building had been told the guy had OD’ed. I broke into the apartment again, and found the sheets and clothes and most of the mattress in that room burned — they’d disabled the fire alarm and just destroyed it there and then. Vented it good, too, didn’t smell much.”

“So something highly dangerous, infectious… in _the_ most densely populated cities in the world —”

“The police knew who to send,” Frank said. “I think they’ve been getting these reports for a while. They’ve been trying to cover it up, get it under control — for a while now, I think. It just went public today. And that’s bad, that’s really bad news.”

“My family,” Karen stuttered, “my friends —“

“It’s not too late,” Frank said. “Call them up. Bribe them. Convince them. Hell, maybe even tell them the truth, if you think they’ll believe it. Tell them to get out of town, pack clothes and food that’ll last, head for sparely populated areas. If they’re already in one, stockpile food and hunker down.”

Karen was already pulling out her phone. Her hands were shaking. Frank’s palm closed over them. “Take a minute,” he said. “Breathe. Panic at them only if panic is the way to get them moving. Gotta be stone cold if it's not. Think of what you want to say, the best angle to come at them from. The best way to unstick them even briefly from their comfortable lives.”

She emitted a shaky laugh. “You just asked me to trust you, that was all it took. How did you know I would, that I wouldn’t call the cops or call you insane or ask for a better explanation?”

“Didn’t,” he said.

A heartbeat. Another one. Karen felt her pulse slow down. Her mind leapt to greetings, explanations, as she turned on her phone.

“Dial now,” said Frank. “Start with the one you care about the most. Then move down the list.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It took the end of the world for Frank Castle to become a normal person.

Foggy dismissed the idea of leaving New York. “I have my _first real case_ on Tuesday,” he said urgently, like she was the one who didn't understand. “People are watching me, wondering if my performance for the Castle case was a fluke — you have no idea what it’s like in the office. It’s a piranha tank, Karen!"

"Just take _three days_  off. You told me how much Hogarth seemed to like you, won't she let you have that?"

“Every news report I’ve read on this indicates that it’s fine! I drove past Metro-General this morning, everything seems to be going okay! No crazy cannibals. No big government cover-up. Unless you can direct me to a really credible source that can corroborate your story —“

He was talking like a lawyer. Of course he’d always been a lawyer, but six weeks working for those people had made him sharper, faster, more aggressive in his speech.

“—I don’t know what exactly the story was with your friend seeing CDC people coming to pick up the girl who was eating... eating that pedo, but Karen, a lot of crazy things happen in this city, and honestly if that girl’s been trafficked across the Pacific I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s a little… you know, not right—“

“Foggy, shut up,” she said. “Just shut up for a second.”

Silence. Karen closed her eyes and weighed whether telling Foggy about Frank would undermine her credibility, or increase it. It was crazy that she'd left the city in the dead of night with a mass murderer who was supposed to be dead. On the other hand, might that craziness drive home the gravity of the situation?

No. Not for Foggy. Foggy had closed the office and left a friendship to get away from crazy. He wouldn't start listening to her if she explained she'd dashed headlong into it.

“You’re not going to leave the city, I get that,” she said. “But promise me then, that the moment you see anything — weird, or freaky, or the moment things start going wrong, you run. Run before everyone starts running too. Because the only way you’re going to get out is if you have a head start. I am _giving_ _you that head start_ , Foggy. Do you get that? And keep a bag in your car full of essentials — money, identification, clothes, and some nonperishable food. Will you do that, Foggy?”

“Yeah, I will,” he answered at last.

“One more thing,” she said. “I’m going to call my landlord to let you in if you come around this evening. In my bedroom, there’s this tallish cabinet. The bottom drawer has a gun in it.”

Foggy sucked in a shocked breath. “Karen, what —“

“It’s fully loaded. I want you to swing by and grab it tonight. You don’t have to use it, or learn how to use it, it would just make me feel a lot better if you had it. Okay?”

“Yeah,” he said dazedly. “I can do that. Sure.”

:::::

After calling Foggy, she took a deep breath and dialed her parents. And then her best friends from home. She called Elena Cardenas, she called the old man who lived across her apartment, she called the Nelson & Murdock clients whose phone numbers she had. She reconnected her charger when the battery ran out and kept on calling people from the floor, all night until her voice went hoarse and dry. Few of them listened to her. She asked them the same thing she’d asked Foggy: to have an emergency bag ready, to keep an eye out for strange things. Karen had built up a lot of goodwill with a lot of people in the past year; many of them said yes.

Finally, after going for a cup of water, she called Matt.

It went to voicemail. Karen felt a flutter of annoyance and relief: he was probably out in that stupid suit of his, hopping roofs and concussing people. She didn’t give him the same spiel she’d given everyone else. She opened huskily with “I assume you already know what’s really happening, but in case you don’t…”

She ended with, “I’m safe, I’m with a friend, we’re in West Virginia and we’re good to go. Don’t worry about me. But Foggy won’t leave, he’s got this court case… I know you guys haven’t spoken for months, but I need you to take care of him, Matt. I know our last talk didn’t end too well, and you may not want to talk to me, but… please call me back when you can. Um. Take care.”

Karen hung up, feeling foolish. Frank was watching her when she looked up. “Matt,” he said thoughtfully. “That’s the blind one, the one you like.”

“Yep,” Karen said, and maintained eye contact.

“You asked him to take care of Nelson and not the other way around.”

“Yep.”

“So I guess he told you he’s been running around in that stupid mask punching people for justice or something,” Frank concluded. Karen felt her face go weird shapes. Frank laughed at her. “You know, I wasn’t a _hundred_ percent sure until you just made that expression — that’s some crazy stuff, huh? He’s really blind.”

“Yeah,” said Karen quietly, her gut a knot of complicated emotion. “He’s really blind.”

“He’ll be fine. He's probably the most dangerous thing in the city right now.”

“Yeah,” Karen said again.

She had nightmares that night; huge vivid ones, full of cannibalism and blood. In one she walked back into the building where she’d shot Fisk’s man Wesley, only to find that he was being eaten by a gang of sharp-toothed children. In another she burst into a courtroom, begging Foggy to leave because the building was surrounded, only to find him furious at her for interrupting the proceedings and embarrassing him in front of his colleagues. He wouldn’t listen even as the jurors started crawling over the barrier making hungry, rattling noises. In another she was floating high in the sky, with a bird’s eye view of Manhattan, and Matt was a blot of red in a sea of gray bodies down on the street. Except this was Matt as she’d known him for over a year, gentle and blind and physically defenseless, and he shouted confusion and pain as hands closed over him —

Someone was shaking her awake. “Ma’am,” said Frank. “Hey.”

Karen made a sound of protest, and then came awake. “Oh shit,” she said, trying to clear away the daze of nightmares, trying to appear lucid and in control. “Was I making noise?”

“Not much, but you were tossing around a lot,” he said. “You woke up Max.”

“Sorry, Max,” she said blurrily. She sat up. The dog was near the foot of her bed, both front paws braced against the mattress as he looked at her. “...I had a dream about what’s happening in New York. My friends.”

She looked up at him, wanting desperately to ask him if she could crawl into his bed. She missed sleeping with people, feeling the warm of their body pressed against hers. But the connotations would be inescapable, and she didn’t want that, or for him to think that she did. She said, instead, “Can I, um… can I put Max on my bed tonight? Or did you train him not to go on furniture?”

As an answer, Frank gently scooped up the dog and deposited him on her. Karen found her face being enthusiastically licked. “Doggy breath!” she said, holding Max away from her face by his collar. He lay down next to her willingly when she started scratching his belly. “Thank you, Frank.”

“Welcome,” he said, taciturn. Perhaps he didn’t want to embarrass her. “Good night.”

Karen lay a hand over Max’s ribs, feeling the dog’s strong heartbeat under skin knotted with scars, and fell into surprisingly dreamless sleep.

:::::

The world turned on a dime within four days.

The first was that every major city in America was shut down. The smaller roads were blockaded. People were evacuated at a trickle at several dozen choke points, checked for fevers or bite marks. Quarantine camps sprang up around the barriers. Karen watched the news from her computer, biting her fingers and thinking of everyone in New York she had left behind. Everyone she’d tried to warn.

There was little official reporting on anything going on inside the cities, but Twitter was on fire. There was a warning on the website that accounts could be fictionalized, but the reports were consistent: we are trapped. They are at the doors. They are eating people. And there were photos, videos, horrifying and censored rapidly for violent content, but the censors couldn’t get them all. Not even close.

In her teens, Karen had read her fair share of nineties apocalypse fiction: a lot of Philip K. Dick, Vonnegut, Stephen King. She had a weird survivalist cousin, she’d played Cathy's favorite video games together as a child. She was accustomed to narratives about societal dissolution through war or plague or invasion. The slow threat, the initial disbelief, the dawning hysteria…

None of those narratives had caught up to the Internet. In a week or two the Internet would be gone, when the people started leaving their posts at power plants for good, leaving the grid to shut down. But the week was enough. The initial disbelief phase came and went by a flicker. In the span of a few days everyone in America knew what was happening, through the marvelous network of communication the species had spun from light and silicon and rare metals. If there were any misconceptions at all, it was about how fast everything would devolve. How fast the lights would go out. How fast they’d lose contact with loved ones just a city away, or the farmlands and factories that fed them all over the world.

As America's leadership sent out increasingly panicked orders for people to stay where they were if they weren’t in a large urban center, people fled — to the mountains, up north, to lakes, following a diverse body of advice, much of it bad. The complicated, far-flung network of transportation that kept goods, information, and electricity moving throughout the country didn’t survive the mass desertion of its labor.

“I _really_ should have become a butcher,” Foggy said fervently in his last phone call to Karen, which had started off with babbled apologies. “In my hometown, which doesn’t have _fifty-story buildings_ crammed with man-eating plague victims. They were pouring out of the _elevators_.”

“And you so optimistic about your new job a week ago,” Karen said, keeping her tone light because she couldn’t afford to cry. Foggy was calling from a quarantine area — he was optimistic that he’d get cleared, he was in perfect health (aside from the office donuts, he said) and there wasn’t a mark on him. “Have you found Matt?”

“No, I haven’t been able to reach him since you called me that night,” Foggy said. “I went to voicemail. I went to his apartment. Three times. During times he should have been there, even with his… you know, night job. But he wasn’t there.”

“Oh,” she exhaled.

With forced brightness, Foggy said, “I asked a nurse friend of mine to check hospital records, though, but he hadn’t been checked in anywhere in the area as of two days ago — which is good. Maybe he’s hunkering down. You know? If I had to bet on anyone’s survival in New York right now, it’d be Matt. I’m sure he’s fine.”

“Yeah,” she echoed.

Soberly, Foggy said, “And you? You’re doing okay?”

_Foggy, the innkeeper where I'm staying came around knocking early this morning. His eyes were all sunken and his hair was pressed to his scalp with sweat. He said, "I'm very sorry, but I know Mr. Page has a gun in his room..."_

“I have a license,” Frank had said quickly.

“It’s none of my business,” said the innkeeper. His name was Winters. Karen couldn’t remember his first name — she only knew the surname because it was the inn’s name. A family business, probably. “It’s just that the last guest — she didn’t check out yesterday when she was supposed to. When I went into her room, she was… one of them. The skin-eaters like on the news.”

“I can take care of her, yeah,” Frank said, exchanging a quick glance with Karen.

Winters licked his lips. “She… she bit me, though, before I could shut the door. Bit hard. Never thought someone could bite another human being like that. I disinfected it real quick but I’m running a pretty serious fever now… I've seen what happens next, the videos are all over YouTube. Mr. Page, you’ve got the look of a man who’s served. You’ll do what needs to be done, won’t you?”

“Yeah.” Frank’s voice was terribly gentle. “Yeah, I will. Let’s go outside, sir.”

“Before I do, if your lady would write an e-mail for my daughters… my hands are shaking so hard I can’t even use the mouse on the computer downstairs…”

That was how Karen had spent the morning: typing out an email for a dying man’s children.

After that Frank had taken the man out back and shot him.

“Yeah, Foggy. I'm doing okay,” she said. “Really quiet area, don't think I'll run into trouble anytime soon. Take care. Call when you’ve relocated.”

:::::

They buried Winters. Then they went for the guest who’d infected him.

She was down on the first floor, which was why they hadn’t heard the altercation the previous day. Frank and Karen stood outside the door where they could hear her thumping around and eyed each other. Karen’s heart rate was elevated. She felt safe enough with Frank there, but there was something incredibly eerie about these creatures… and she hadn’t even seen any of them in real life, not yet. The videos had been enough.

Frank said, “I don’t want to kill her just yet.”

"There aren't any reports of them recovering from... zombiehood. I don’t think it would be a mercy.”

Frank was shaking his head. “Not for mercy. How much do we know about these creatures, anyway? How do they track their prey? Do they use all the senses we have? The news seems very muddled on the matter.”

“I can see why this is interesting and potentially important,” Karen said, “but I’m not sure if finding out is worth the danger.”

“I don’t think we even need to go in,” Frank said thoughtfully. “There’s a window. Opposite side of the room. You see?”

Karen blinked, warming to the idea. “We can blink a flashlight into the room and check if they react to light. Tap the glass for sound. Um… do you think she uses smell?”

Frank’s face was alight with interest. Karen remembered with a pang the way the papers had painted him before and during his trial — an animal, a creature of violence. None of them had ever seen him like this, unbruised and clean-shaven and vividly intelligent. “We draw her to the window, and then… drop clothing in front of the door, maybe.”

“Yeah,” Karen breathed. “That’ll work!”

They tiptoed away, aflame with scientific curiosity.

The zombie — Karen was coming around to the word — didn’t react to the flashlight, or the sight of their faces pressed to the window. It reacted a little to tapping, a little to barking, and greatly to the sound of human voices. It didn’t react to the sound of its own juddering groans played back to itself on a recorder. And it reacted to scent; when Karen dropped a bundle of her underwear and the shirt Frank had just been wearing in front of the doorway, it didn’t take long for the zombie to react to it. But it moved the fastest for fresh blood, taken from Winters’ clothing before they buried him.

“That’s really creepy,” Karen said, peering in the window and watching the thing that used to be a woman pawing at the door, trying to get at the shirt of a dead man. “Um… wow. Is the gravesite going to attract attention?”

“Maybe it’s just fresh blood,” Frank said, and so they took away the shirt and put it back six hour later. Little reaction.

For the rest of the day they dug latrines two minutes’ walk from the inn. Karen brought up the issue first; she’d been noting news of small blackouts all over the country. She didn’t know a lot about sewer mains, but it made sense to her that if the power plants weren’t being maintained so well anymore, they shouldn't count on toilets running either. Also, it was one of the things the eccentric survivalist cousin had talked about that had actually stuck: the necessity of replacing basic sanitation facilities, and replacing them fast.

Frank knew how to dig latrines. They took turns digging, because Karen insisted. “Sprinkle dirt down after yourself when you’re done,” Frank said. “Masks the smell, keeps the flies away.”

She was really getting used to his presence; the first time she’d met him in person he’d been locked down to a hospital bed, and approaching him had been like going near a heap of living razors. The subsequent times, even when she’d started feeling safe around him, she’d never forgotten how coiled up he was with the capacity for violence. She’d felt it like a charge on her skin.

Now, digging with him in the setting sun —

It took the end of the world for Frank Castle to become a normal person.

When they were done, Karen went online and wrote down onto a notebook everything she could find in blogs run by people like her crazy survivalist cousin. (She took a minute to fire off a grateful email to Cathy.) She looked up how to filter and distill water; how to maintain a small garden; how to care for livestock… everything she could think of that could possibly come in handy one day.

She took notes for hours and hours until her hand burned and the skin on her fingers was pressed and red. Frank took a nap and woke up around nine. “Still going,” he said, after a glance at the clock.

“Yeah,” Karen said. “There’s a lot to be done. A lot we’ll potentially have to do.”

Frank got up, came around her and looked at her computer. “You think we’ll ever need to hotwire a car?”

“Gas,” she said. “We’re not always going to have gas. But there’ll be abandoned vehicles, I think, all around, that we could use…”

“Don’t take too many notes about cars,” Frank said. “I can show you most anything you’ll ever need tomorrow.”

She leaned back and smiled up at him, joy leaping through the exhaustion. “We should probably build a water distiller first.”

Frank smiled, but there was something weird in the smile. Karen felt hers fading. “What is it?”

“You,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to… be good at this.”

“Wow,” Karen said, letting the genuine insult show on her face.

“Hey, I don’t know a more honest way to put it,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t expect your lawyer friends to be good at it either, or my old lady when she was alive, or any of my friends from before the war. Hell, even some of the men I served with. What I’m trying to say is — here, look out over there.”

He went to the window. Winters Inn was built on a slight incline, and they were on the second floor. They had a decent view of the town, whose lights were strewn across the land like jewels. “People aren’t good at having the rug pulled out under their feet. Right now all of America has the rug pulled out, and most of them are still where they used to be, pretending the rug’s still there. The folks down there, they’ve locked their doors and bought more toilet paper and food, but they have their lights on and they’re watching television, they’re… waiting for this to blow over, yeah? Someone else is still going to come and fix their next power outage, fix their broken plumbing, truck down more food to the grocery store. Most of them, they still got that mentality. They may be smart people, but I guarantee you most of them aren’t digging latrines or thinking about how to make clean water when the water main goes down.”

“They’ve done the little things,” Karen said, “so their brain takes a shortcut and says, I’ve done enough to get ready…”

“Yeah, you got it. But the thing is, when something this big happens, there’s no _enough_ in preparing. You have to throw your whole self into being ready. I saw people doing it when I was stationed in Iraq. Most of the locals, at least where I was, they're on their feet, they’re ready to go at a moment’s notice. They're old hands at weighing life against the trappings of life and making the right choice fast. When I asked you in Hell’s Kitchen, you didn’t take two seconds, you said you’d come with me. I thought maybe it was just a stupid amount of trust."

"It was,” Karen said. She saw his reflection in the window blink twice.

“It’s not just that, though,” Frank insisted. “You were _ready to go._ Right now, too, you’re _ready to go_. You’re keeping pace with things, going, okay, this is what’s going to happen, this is what we need to do. You’re not flinching from it — not even, you know, subconsciously. So I just wanna know, I guess. Why you’re like that. Where you learned to do that. ‘cause no one responds to a hurdle like this on their first try. This have anything to do with that gun you had, the good one back in New York?”

Karen hissed and turned away, a full-body flinch. Frank was thinking now that she was some kind of badass, she supposed. Thinking that she’d picked out that gun, that she had any experience with it other than unloading it into a man’s chest feeling like her own was molten with terror.

She’d spent the next few days feeling unmoored from her own body, looking over her shoulder — for the police, for more henchmen. And the fear of reprisal had been so great that it had drowned out any other feeling, including remorse. And the fear had slowly, slowly gone away, but the remorse had never appeared.

“I killed a man once,” she said, turning around to face Frank as she said it. It took the end of the world for Karen to tell the truth. “He was Wilson Fisk’s man. They say Fisk tore the city apart trying to find who did it.”

“How’d you pull it off?”

She shook her head impatiently. “I didn’t plan it. He took me to an abandoned building. I don’t think he told anyone where he was going, or I wouldn’t be alive. I’d been doing some investigating into Fisk's past… pissed him off in a big way. He was threatening me, he put his gun on the table between us. Took his eyes off it. He was going to kill me anyway, so I took the plunge. Took the shot. Took... seven of them.”

“Good,” said Frank remorselessly. The expression on his face horrified Karen a little. She had hoped for understanding; she had not expected pride. “Better you than him.”

She opened her mouth to argue, to protest, and realized she didn’t disagree. And that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? She _wasn’t_ sorry. Not even a little.

The argument they could have had disappeared.

He was watching her face. “Sorry for pushing, ma’am. Didn’t realize it was something like that.”

“It’s okay,” she said wearily. “I’ve never told anyone. Um… the gun, Foggy has it now. I don’t really like holding it, to be honest.”

“You might have to.”

“I know,” she said grimly.

:::::

A week later, the power went. The Internet went. Everything ground to a halt all at once, and Karen’s world suddenly narrowed from the width of a continent to a width of a small town inn.

This was a bit of a blessing, because this was when the real horror show started, all over America, and Karen didn’t get reports of any of it until much later as stories. Many of the survivalists who’d fled to the mountains realized they were getting sick from the water. The people who fled north realized they didn’t have heat. The people who drove away in panic from their newly deadly homes ran out of gas, congesting and eventually choking the roads.

And everyone ran out of food.

Most people who’d set out to go somewhere safer had made a number of smart choices, but they hadn’t made all of them. And even those who’d prepared better than others got sick in an environment where people weren’t paying attention to hygiene, and found their makeshift pharmacies being rapidly depleted.

And, of course, there were still the zombies.

Frank and Karen were spared most of this. They heard almost nothing from the outside world for a while; the inn was small, situated in a road that may have been a major throughfare about eighty years ago but now exclusively served travelers heading from one nowhere to another. They spent their days turning the inn into a self-sufficient shelter: the plan was to finish fortifying the wall and gate in two weeks, and then venture down to Logran to see if there was anyone they could trade with. They were going to head down with the smallest water distiller and offer to teach people how to make it. Build up some goodwill.

It didn’t quite happen that way.

One night, Karen woke up to Max barking. Frank was already awake and on his feet, a figure of shadow and muscle. “Quiet,” he said to Max, who obeyed immediately. Karen slid out of bed, listening hard.

Frank said, "I heard glass break in two or three different places. That's people. Zombies wouldn't have gotten past the wall.”

“Shit,” Karen breathed. "What are we —"

“Here’s a gun,” Frank said, passing her one in the dark. “I’m going to load two more and put them under your bed right here, in case you run out. I’m going to lock the door behind you, but if someone breaks in without knocking or calling you by your name, shoot them. Don’t even check. Shoot first. You got it?”

“Yes.”

Then he was gone, ghosting out of the room. The door clicked shut behind him. Karen waited in the darkness, adrenaline and glass. She heard voices downstairs — fuck, that sounded like a _lot_ of people. She tugged Max’s collar gently so that he would come to her, and wrapped her arm around his warm body. His heart beat against her elbow; he was tense, too.

There was a shot. Karen flinched, but she didn’t hear a scream. Warning shot: Frank. The hubbub did crescendo, a wave of outraged male voices. She heard Frank’s cutting through it, harsh and warning. Did anyone down there have a light, or were they all speaking in darkness?

The din quieted for a moment, as if Frank was getting through to them — _get out, there is nothing for you here, this is our place._ Oh please, Karen thought. Let this resolve itself peacefully…

Then the shooting started.

There were multiple guns. Max started growling nervously. Karen held him, watching the door, fingering the trigger of her gun gently. There were a lot of people running around and shouting downstairs, but she thought she could make out people climbing the stairs — there were two of them, at both ends of the main hallway. Frank and Karen decided to keep both open so that there would be less chance of being hemmed in. There were people running down the hall, trying doors. She could hear them slamming open.

“This one’s locked!” she heard someone yell a few seconds later, right in front of her door. “She must be in here!”

_She?_

Karen aimed at the very center of the door and shot three times. Someone screamed. Then there was the sound of wood splintering, and the frame around the lock gave way. She shot again, this time badly, because the flash from the first three shots had blinded her. Max was barking up a storm.

Everything happened in a handful of seconds. Someone tackled her onto Frank’s bed, grunting unpleasantly; Karen gasped in pain as his fist found her hair and yanked hard. Karen brought the pistol around and tried to find his neck or chest, but the man shoved at her, and they both rolled clumsily onto the ground. A flashlight swept across her vision. “Get her gun!” someone said, and suddenly her right fingers, still tangled up in the gun, were being stomped into the ground. She yelped, pinned to the floor, and knocked her hand under the bed as if in pain, seeking one of the other two guns.

Max's barks suddenly broke off into a keening whimper; someone had just kicked him.

Murder flared in her heart.

“All right, all right,” she said. “I won’t shoot! Let go of me.”

The man with the flashlight was pointing it at her, making her squint. “A blonde,” he drawled. “I like blondes. Good find, all.”

The shooting downstairs at stopped, leaving just the chaotic thumps and a lot of shouting. Karen’s heart pounded painfully. She remembered, suddenly, the laundry line outside the inn, stretched out between the back door and a tree branch. A number of Frank’s shirts hung there, a pair of her jeans. And some of her underwear. They'd realized that there was a woman inside, and they'd come looking for her.

She didn’t need to feign shakiness when she spoke. “How — how many of you are there?”

“Fourteen,” the man with the flashlight said lazily. That wasn't so bad, for Frank. When Karen exhaled sharply, he chuckled, mistaking her relief for fear. “Don’t be too scared, lady. We’ll take turns.”

That did it. Karen swept her left hand out from under the bed and shot him with one of the backup guns. She’d aimed for the chest, but it caught him in his shoulder. He shouted out, dropping his flashlight — the beam of light spun crazily around the room as it clattered down.

“Holy shit —“ someone started.

“NOBODY FUCKING MOVE.”

The man at the door struck a match before anyone could disobey. A flame guttered into life, illuminating a painted nightmare of a man.

Karen stared.

“Step away from the nice lady,” said Frank. Almost all of him that was visible, from hairline to belt, was coated in a thick film of blood. “Will you?”

 _“Holyshit,”_ the man behind Karen gabbled. She could hear him scrambling away from Frank, backing all the way into the corner.

The one holding Karen’s hair clenched it tighter, forcing her head to the floor. “You! I’ll shoot your wife! I'll fucking do it! Put down the…”

But Frank wasn’t holding anything except the match. His brows rose slowly as the man holding Karen realized it. “Do you hear anything downstairs? No? It’s because everyone is dead,” he said. “I’ll slaughter you like animals if you don’t put down that fucking gun and join your shitstain friend in that corner. Right. _Now_.”

A clatter. The thump of feet.

Karen rose, slowly. “Frank.”

Frank licked his lips, still staring at the men in the corner. His face was glazed over, and not just with blood. He looked almost hypnotized. The man at his feet, the one Karen had shot, moaned softly. “Please,” he said. All his bravado was gone. “I’m, I’m just an accountant. Just let us go.”

“May I kill them?” Frank said softly, the glazed look still on his face. A terrible feeling gripped Karen; he wasn’t quite right. “I won’t if it’ll please you. They’re not trained, they weren’t. Soldiers. It was like slaughtering sheep.”

Shadows flickered in the entire room as the hand holding the match shook.

Karen stood up. Her legs felt like jelly. The men in the corner were terrified of them both — she could see the whites of their eyes. “God,” she said softly. “How many dead bodies downstairs?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. It was hard to see in the dark.” Frank glanced down at the man Karen had shot. “This one’s going to go, too. He’s bleeding out fast. I think you got his brachial artery.”

“No,” the man moaned. “No, no, no…”

The match had burned down almost to Frank’s fingers, but he didn’t seem to notice. Karen crossed the room and picked up the flashlight. “Stamp out the match, Frank,” she said. Frank obeyed. She aimed the flashlight at the two men left alive. “You two will live,” she said, surprised at how cold she sounded. The one who'd backed off immediately when Frank came in was crying softly. “We’re going to tie you up, and in the morning you’ll bury the rest and clean their blood off our floors. And then we’ll let you go. Does that sound fair, gentlemen?”

“Yes,” they said, in unison.

“Excellent,” Karen said. She picked up one of the guns from the floor and cocked it. “Would you get me the rope, Frank?”

:::::

She left the men tied up in the room, cleared the weapons off the floor, and steered Frank into the kitchen downstairs where there were buckets of clean water. They moved slowly, so Max could keep up. He was limping a little.

Frank was shaking throughout. Karen had no idea what was happening to him; she’d seen him disembowel men before without breaking a sweat.

Karen placed the stolen flashlight on the counter. “Strip down,” she said.

Frank obeyed silently. He’d gone to sleep in a pair of worn pajama pants that had been in Winters’ closet and a thin white shirt. Both were covered with blood. He folded both on the floor, and then a pair of faded gray boxers.

Oh. Well. The boxers weren’t in great shape either, it was probably for the best he'd taken them off. “Wash your face,” she instructed, feeling a lunatic confusion as he again obeyed silently. Was he in shock, or something. Why _now_? He’d been so damned competent and _sane_ ever since he’d come to get her in Hell's Kitchen. He’d made jokes, he’d comforted her when she panicked about her family and friends, he’d taught her how to break into a car with a coathanger. She watched Frank scrub the blood off his face. “That’s good. Chest and arms, now.”

There was more blood painting his arms, but the blood on his chest had gotten into the wiry black hair there, and cleaning it out took an entire bucket of water. Karen handed him the next one and said, “Legs." Now that he was clean she could see where he’d sustained injuries. They seemed to be minor cuts and bruises, for the most part. Nowhere near as bad as the first time she’d met him in that hospital room, or even how he’d looked in court.

None of these men had been much of a threat to him.

“Sit down, I’m getting bandages." Karen took the flashlight and one of the smaller guns, going to the storeroom that held most of their medical supplies. After that she went into Winters’ old room at the back of the building to get some more of his clothes — Frank’s were in the same room the two living men were in, and she didn’t want to go back there. She found a pair of boxers that seemed Frank’s size and a worn old wifebeater, and an expensive-feeling pair of slacks that were the only pants she could find in the room.

Frank was where she’d left him, cleanish and naked, dripping water onto the kitchen floor. He was staring off into space. “Here,” she said, placing Winters’ clothing on the table next to him. “Put these on.”

He obeyed, movements slow and jerky. She poured some of the clean water into a cup and made him drink. Quietly, she asked, “Will you tell me what’s going on with you?”

His head swayed mutely. She thought it was refusal at first, but then he spoke. “The men downstairs. I think most of them were just. Looking for food. They kept saying they wouldn't hurt me if I gave it to them.”

“Ah,” she whispered, trying not to think about that. “You’ve never killed anyone who wasn’t… a criminal before.”

"Of course I have. In the war.” His words were punctuated weirdly. With shock, Karen thought. “That’s not it. Not wholly. It’s that I went downstairs and. They crowded me in the hallway. They were trying to stick me, so I shot a bunch of them. Then they were all over me. Close quarters. Gun’s not much good. I wrestled a knife off one of them. Men on every side. Not fighters, easy to take down. Too easy. Last time I did that was in prison. Fisk. Locked me in a cell block so his rival’s men could kill me. Ended up killing them. Didn’t even think about it, see? Like now.”

Karen remembered reading about a bloody altercation in the facility Frank had been in, right before he escaped. But the news had made it sound like they’d just turned on each other. Shit shit shit. Goddamn  _Fisk_.

“Ma’am,” he said lowly. “It’s gotten too easy. To kill. Someone’s got to rein me back. And with everyone fighting for food and shelter and water like now, it’s going to be harder than ever to figure out who deserves to be shot and who deserves to walk away. Not my judgment. Not anymore.”

“It’s not _anyone’s_ ,” Karen said fiercely. “It never _was_.”

“ _Please_.” Frank was starting to shiver. “Good people refuse to make those choices. Their better natures. Get in the way. That’s why bad people ending up doing it. You see? You have to do it for me. Can’t do it for myself.”

“I’m not telling you when to kill people!” Karen exclaimed.

“Want to stay human. Can’t do it if I’m making the call every time. Asking you.” Frank’s eyes were lambent with despair. “I know it’s a lot. You don’t owe me anything. ’s why I’m begging.”

Karen swore lowly, and buried her face in her fists, letting her knuckles dig into her eyes. She’d let herself forget, in these past weeks, how profoundly broken he was. “You couldn’t have come to this conclusion when you killed Schoonover, could you.”

“Sorry,” Frank husked out. And then: "I wish I had."

They sat in silence for another few minutes. Karen heard her own voice slurred with exhaustion when she said, “Can I sleep on this? Let's sleep on this.”

They stumbled into one of the unoccupied first-floor rooms. This one had one bed, but neither of them suggested finding another room. They kicked off their shoes, pushed down the covers and staggered in. Karen found herself wrapping her arms around Frank and squeezing hard.

Before slipping into sleep, a thought slipped out from the edge of her subconscious: _My_ monster. No one was going to get him.

:::::

They slept until noon. Karen woke up still tangled up in Frank, nose pressed into his dark hair. He radiated heat like a furnace; she was sweating a little under the sheets. She climbed out, feeling a little fuzzy and shocked still. There were a dozen bodies in the building, and two live men to deal with.

But daylight made it easier.

She left Frank to sleep and grabbed a gun, going upstairs to untie the men. They didn’t look like they’d slept well — they both went ashy when Karen entered the room. “I’m going to untie you,” she said — quietly, so her voice wouldn’t waver and betray her. “Then you’ll go outside and dig graves where I tell you to. And then you’ll drag the bodies and bury them. And then you’ll clean up the blood and brains on my floor downstairs. And then you’ll skip town. We’ll give you food and water throughout the day. At the end of it, you start walking, and we wave goodbye. Is this all sounding good to you?”

They both nodded.

“Excellent,” she said, and undid the knots, careful to keep the gun away from them. But they didn’t seem even a little inclined to go for it; any fight that had been in them was gone. “I’ll show you where the shovels are.”

Frank came out of the inn an hour into the gravedigging, which took place near the spot Winters was buried. Karen rested under the shade of a tree and watched them, thinking: five or six weeks ago she’d been dressing up and going to job interviews in coffeeshops. She’d ordered lattes and talked up her degree and experience. Now she was overseeing the digging of a mass grave with a gun.

Frank came and sat down beside her. He seemed much more lucid than he had the past night; his gaze was sharp, attentive. “You think we can afford to let them go?”

“As you said, they’re not much of a threat.”

“But where do they come from? Are they part of a larger group? Will they come back for us?”

This were important, unpleasant questions. “Their lunch break’s coming up. You want to question them? They’re pretty damn terrified of you, I think they’d tell the truth.”

:::::

The men’s names were Arrey and Wathen. Arrey had been a plumber a month ago. Wathen was a bricklayer. They tore into their lunch, the shittiest-tasting nutrient bars Karen and Frank had, as if it was manna. When they took their shirts off to dig under the sun, she could see their ribs.

Frank interrogated them separately, locking one indoors while he talked to the other. Their stories matched up: they’d been recruited by the same ringleader of the gang a week or two ago, one of the men who lay dead in the lobby. He looked for single men with no children, and promised them food and shelter — shelter was a chain of houses in Logran, and food they got by scouting for occupied buildings to raid during the day, and attacking them at night.

It came out — eventually, under Frank's unrelenting questions — that there were four women captive in the houses. They and the foraged food were guarded by three men by Arrey’s count, four by Wathen’s. The disparity seemed innocent, a matter of confusion. They were not lying. They were hungry and desperate men who wanted to live.

Karen listened emotionlessly. She let the men resume their work in dragging bodies into the graves, and said to Frank, “We need to go get those women.”

“Yeah,” he said. It was a foregone conclusion. “You still want to keep these guys alive?”

“I promised them.”

“They’re scum.”

But he didn’t say this with heat, like he’d argue with her. Karen looked at him with mild dread, realizing he'd meant what he said last night, that he'd obey her if she told him to let the men go. This was in her hands.

“Let’s put it off until we get the women,” she said. “I want their opinion.”

They tied up Arrey and Wathen again and set out, giving themselves a two or three hour margin between departure and sunset.They walked — Ben's car still had gas, but that was for an emergency.

Frank was again bristling with weaponry, and Karen carried a bottle of water, a small emergency kit, and a pool cue whose tip had been shaved into a long mean point. They started seeing rotting body parts on the roadside as they approached the address Arrey and Wathen had given them — remnants of the raiders’ dispatching zombies near their territory, Karen thought. Or hoped. Surely none of those had been people, pre-infection.

She didn’t check.

The pertinent houses came into view after forty minutes of walking. Karen cocked her head at them. “Here’s what we do. I draw them out. You shoot. Keep it nonlethal if you can.”

“Alternate idea,” Frank growled. “I go in. I shoot. You stay out here.”

Karen spread her hand. “What, all defenseless on the street while you’re smashing kneecaps?”

A muscle jumped in his jaw as he saw her point. “Anyone gets too near you, I shoot them in the head. So keep your distance if you want these sods alive.”

After some conferring over angles and emergency strategies, Karen walked up to the front door of the one in the middle, and Frank took cover behind an overgrown hedge across the street.

“Hello!” she called out loudly, dropping a real tremble into her voice. “I heard there are people here who have food. I also heard you’re looking for women. Is this true?”

A full minute passed. Then a window opened. A surly-looking male poked his head out. “Yeah, where’d you hear that from?”

“The whole town knows,” she said. “I, I heard there were dozens of you. That a couple of women came to you already for protection. Is, is that true?”

“Huh,” the man said, and withdrew his head. Karen heard him call out within the house. “Hey, Rodriguez, McKnight, come out and look at this!”

A minute later three men appeared on the porch, none of them carrying a gun. Karen’s heart leapt. Was there a fourth man, or could this be over so easily? She moved a little to the left, giving Frank a clear shot. “She wants protection,” said the first man. “Heard that we take in women.”

Karen gave him a sweet, frail look.

“It’s a pretty dangerous world out there right now for ladies like you,” said one of the others. He had an easy, greasy smile. “But we don’t have a whole lot of food, only taking in individuals right now. Don’t have a husband or children, do you?”

Three shots rang out, spaced evenly. All three men crumpled, their right knees suddenly a mess of blood.

“Not really,” Karen said.

Frank walked out. He was still wearing the old wifebeater with the expensive-looking slacks from Winters’ closet, and Karen found an unexpected tendril of amusement pushing through her grimness. “Any more of you?” he said conversationally, jabbing at the nearest man’s face with the barrel of his gun. “If you lie and we find out, we’ll shoot you.”

“No!” the man gasped. “No more!”

“Don’t be fucking stupid! He's with whichever gang took down Bradley and the rest,” the greasy one hissed. To Frank he said, “There’s one more. Was fucking his girl. Probably come running out now with his pants down —“

“Oh, that one,” Frank said, looking at the door and raising his gun.

 _Bang_.

Frank marshaled the four of them into a heap on the porch. “Will you go check on the women inside?” he said. “I’ll watch these scumbags.”

“Yeah,” Karen said quietly. “I’ll go.”

 

:::::::

 

Tanya was really fucking pissed off.

She was pissed off because that idiot Vaughn hadn’t followed rules and used a condom like everyone else did. He hadn’t come in her, but you could still get pregnant if precum pushed out sperm from the last ejaculation. She was pissed off because condoms failed and she might get pregnant anyway if one of those shitheads had fumbled it, or simply if her luck was bad. She was pissed off because she’d spent her ten years of sexual activity being conscientious about birth control and STI checks and now it was all out of the window because she’d been raped about six times a day for the past eight days.

But mostly she was pissed off because if she stopped being pissed off, the other, scarier emotions were going to crowd into her head and she wasn’t fucking ready for those.

There had been gunshots outside. Vaughn had pulled his pants up and gone running, but she was still tied to the bed and there had been silence for about two minutes.

All this, like most other things in the past week, made her furious.

Tanya couldn't help starting when door opened. When she craned her head she could see a tallish woman holding a pool cue. She looked distraught when she came around the bed to start undoing the knots in the rope keeping Tanya’s wrists fastened to the headboard. She was very… blonde, Tanya thought. Beautiful in an elfin sort of way. Not Tanya’s type, but the men would probably like her.

And then her hands were free, and the woman was helping Tanya sit up and guiding a bottle of water to her lips, and it struck her that maybe there _was no men_. The house was oddly quiet.

“What’s happening?” she said, coughing on the water. “Who are you? Are you new?”

"The inn I'm staying in got raided last night,” said the woman. “We live thirty minutes away. We — we dispatched them, and two that were left told us about you. So I and a friend came to get you. Um. My name is Karen Page. Can you show me where the other women are?”

So Tanya stumbled up, put on some pants, and they got Madeleine and Amy and Helena. Amy, as usual, was so unresponsive that Helena had to half-carry her out of the house. Madeleine’s leg had grown a rudimentary cast since Tanya'd seen her last, so she needed Karen to help her out of the basement. Everything was a babble of exchanged information and sobbed relief. There was a ten minute span when everyone seemed to be crying except Tanya.

“Sunset’s soon,” said Karen eventually. “We should start walking back. Can you all grab the food they have around here and carry it back? That would be really useful.”

:::::

There was a decent amount of food; they had to break into several sheds until they found a wagon. They were helped by Karen’s ‘friend’ Frank, who turned out to be a scruffy, bruised man wearing fancy pants and an undershirt. Tanya forgave him for the pants when she saw that he was holding a gun to Vaughn and the others, all of whom were bleeding and bleating about it. She ferried large boxes of mac and cheese to the wagon out on the street and felt a ferocious grin split her face as she did so. She gave Vaughn a good kick in the pants, and the man friend Frank gained her liking when he didn’t even twitch.

They were loaded up and ready to go when Frank stirred and spoke to Karen. “You decide what to do with them?”

He had a quiet, hoarse voice, and looked at Karen like a man devoted. Friend her ass. It felt like ages since Tanya had seen two people in love. It was kind of weird.

Karen rested her head against the pool cue and was quiet for a second. “I don’t think it’s our vote. Tanya? Helena? Madeleine? The four men on the porch?”

Madeleine’s voice came out smoky with hate. “What are our options, miss?”

“We can kill them. Or just leave them.”

“If we leave them,” Helena said, “the townspeople will get them. The ones that are left, anyway.”

“You sure?” Karen said.

“Unless they manage to find some more guns or knives and do more harm before they're put down. But I hope Joey Laughton finds them first. He was Logran's butcher, and they killed his son."

Frank looked at Karen for a long while, weirdly tense.

Karen said, “It’d be pure cowardice to leave them, then.”

Frank nodded, as if this were an order, and turned to walk towards the porch. His weaponry bulged out of his duffel bag in pleasing ways. Then Karen said “No," and he stopped in his tracks.

Karen swung around to look at Tanya and the others. Her gaze was very wide, like a summer sky that was almost too bright to look at. “Would... would any of you like to do the honors?”

“Yes,” Tanya said, with rusty eagerness.

“Yes,” said Helena.

Madeleine was nodding.

“Four men,” Karen said. “Three of you.” It was obvious to everyone Amy wasn’t going to come out of her daze anytime soon.

“I’d be happy to take two,” Tanya said, feeling her lips curve. “I already know which ones.”

“We’d like to conserve bullets,” Karen said softly. “So if you’d please take one shot per man. To the head, please. Those are the rules.”

:::::

They cleared out, the three women sharing one gun. Tanya caught an incomprehensible snatch of speech as she left:

“...just because I accept it, Frank, doesn't mean you're my  _weapon_.”

:::::

The Pages turned out to be staying in Winters Inn, that old place that had been hanging on by a thread for years. Tanya was astonished to see what it had been turned into — the decorative wall had been turned into a bristling shoulder-height fence, and there were gardens behind the inn, tendrils of green sprouting out of moist dark soil. Potatoes, said Karen. And carrots and onions. The sinks didn’t run, of course, but they had a contraption in the garden that ran vapor through a hose and deposited into a bucket. It tasted _clean_.

“So, uh, we’ve been doing some work here, trying to make it sustainable,” said Karen. She’d glanced nervously around, as if Helena and Madeleine (the younger ones) didn’t already worship her, as if she needed to earn their trust or approval. “If you’d like to stay and help this place keep running… two people isn’t really enough, and we have a lot of rooms, even if a few of the doors are kind of smashed in right now.”

No one said no. Amy didn’t say yes either, but she’d gone to the Pages’ dog and started petting him as soon as she saw him, and Tanya supposed that was as clear an indication of preference as any.

Helena had family in Logran still, an older brother. The Pages came alive with interest when Helena mentioned that he’d majored in agricultural studies; he’d been alive as of a week ago. Plans were made to retrieve him the very next morning, to Helena's joy.

After this decision was made, Frank crossed the room to murmur something to Karen. “Yes, I was about to get to it,” she replied quietly. Then she said to everyone else: “We have two men captured upstairs. Their names are Arrey and Wathen — we weren’t sure what to do with them."

“Let Joe Wathen go,” Madeleine said immediately. “Kill Arrey.”

“Wathen’s no better than the rest of them,” Tanya snapped. “Just because he didn’t fuck you—“

“Whatever you do, kill Arrey. He’s a snake. He used to—“

“Wathen used to bring me food when everyone was asleep. He’s just a _boy_ , Tanya, he go— he went to high school with my brother.“

“Quiet, please,” Karen said, and everyone obeyed. Her face was very grave. “I’d spare people when I can. Do you think either of them would come back for us if we let them go?”

“Arrey, maybe. Wathen no.”

“Arrey would, if he got his hands on a gun.”

“Fuck Arrey.”

Karen nodded. “Okay. We send Wathen on his way. He has no one to go back to anyway, and from the sound of it he won’t round up people and come back. But it seems that…” She looked at Frank, who gave her a blank look back. “Arrey’s too dangerous to release.”

“He’s not _brave_ ,” said Madeleine scornfully. “But he holds a grudge. He’ll wiggle and whine if you have your boot on him, but the moment it’s off he’ll bite you. If he cooperated with you, it’s certainly not because he has a good nature.”

“Okay. Then we take him out back to the field and shoot him.” Karen paused, seeming surprised by her own bluntness. And then she added unhappily, “I’ll do it.”

Frank’s head jerked back. “Why?”

“I’m not passing on the dirty work to everyone else,” she said.

“Give him to me, then,” said Tanya. “I’ll do it happily.”

“Yes. That concerns me,” said Karen, looking straight at Tanya. It was funny — she didn’t _strike_ you as a forceful woman, and then… “No offense, Tanya. I don’t want people who enjoy killing too much to be given the task of doing it. Does that seem — fair? As a condition of staying here?”

Tanya felt her mouth thin. But she said yes, and she met Karen’s gaze so that she knew Tanya meant it.

She helped Frank lead Arrey out into the field out back, though, because it took both of them to restrain Arrey when he figured out what was going on. “No, no, no!” he shouted. “Why me, why not Wathen, you let Wathen go! Why are you listening to these fucking bitch, you don’t know her, she’s not trustworthy —“

Karen’s mouth was set in that same grim unhappy line it had been when she’d announced that she’d be the one to kill Arrey. She didn’t argue with Arrey, explain anything to him, or even tell him to be quiet. She was completely silent as she forced his head down to the ground with her foot, aimed her gun against his head, and fired.

Tanya staggered back. Arrey lay dead, the ground drinking his blood.

The three of them made quick work of digging his grave. Within an hour and half they were walking back to the inn. Tanya said, “If you were so concerned about Wathen or Arrey coming back for you, how do you know any of the others who got away won’t come back?”

Neither of the Pages answered her for a second. Then Karen said, so mildly it seemed like she was trying not to scare Tanya, “There aren’t any who got away. They're buried behind us.”

“Oh,” said Tanya. She didn’t feel scared. She was surprised, yeah, and intrigued. Probably. She was having a little trouble with emotions that weren’t anger — she supposed she’d have to relearn them. It would take a week or two. She schooled her face into an expression of light surprise, so Karen wouldn’t think she was a psychopath or something. It was becoming apparent she needed to stay on Karen’s good side, and besides, she _wasn’t_ a psychopath.

There was no more conversation on the walk back.

The last twist of the night came, when they were eating dinner — watery mac ’n cheese with beans and multivitamins — when Amy raised her head from the corner and said in a faint, light voice that Tanya had never heard before: “I think this dog has a fractured rib. We’re going to need a wrap for his chest.”

There was an astonished silence. Amy’s wide vacant gaze swept the room. One hand was expertly keeping Max steady, the other was rubbing slow circles on his neck. His tail was thumping against the floor in adoration.

“I was a vet,” she added.

“Oh good,” Helena said faintly, beans dripping from her raised spoon. “Never knew.”

Frank had his face turned towards the table, but Tanya caught the edges of a smile on his face. Karen’s face was bright with pleasant blonde surprise. It was marvelous luck netting some kind of medical professional now. Amy, of all people!

“Also if we need milk for… mac ’n cheese, and other things…” Amy seemed to be struggling to focus. Everyone’s attention was on her, breathless with the mention of milk. “I know where there might… be a few cows.”

The apocalypse was kind of looking up.

 

:::::::

 

Karen sat in the new room she and Frank had chosen, sitting in the new bed and muffling her sobs into the new pillow. She didn’t want any of the newcomers to hear her crying. The way they’d looked at her when Tanya Zheng told them what had happened to the other men who’d come to raid the inn last night. Not sickened, or scared, but _admiring_ …

Frank sat next to her, cupping her head and making small, meaningless noises of comfort. He was really good at it. Maybe it was from being a dad.

Just eighteen hours ago he’d been a stuttering mess in the kitchen with his bloody clothes shucked off on the floor, begging Karen to help him be human. It was good that they were taking turns falling apart.

She felt like the entire world was being carved apart at the joints. She had shot a man today. Not like the accountant last night, who’d broken down her door and leered at her, not like Wesley who’d looked at her like trash and threatened to slaughter everyone she loved. She didn’t doubt the women were wrong about Arrey, but he had begged for his life and Karen had just shot him in the head, unable to even speak to him because it would have been a betrayal of her promise to let him go.

At least it had been her. The only thing dirtier than shooting him would have been foisting the job to someone else.

“ _Karen_.” Frank sounded raw. “It was the right thing to do.”

“I know,” she said, fighting little-girl hiccups to speak. “I know I know. I just — need to do this.”

“All right.” His hands closed gently over her shoulders, steadying.

It took almost thirty minutes for her to be done with it. “Really weird,” Karen said when she was finally able to string a sentence together. “How they look at me. Not you. You’re the one with the guns and the death glare and they. Still look at me.”

“Yeah,” Frank said. “You’re good at it.”

“Good at what?”

“People. Coordination. Calming them down, not riling them up. The way you handled the angry one — Tanya? She was like a bomb ready to go off. Not giving her Arrey was the right call, and I didn’t even know it until I saw her face when he was lying dead on the ground. Sure, I could have bullied them. I know a lot of soldiers who could rally a bunch of hurt tired people and make them march. But I haven’t met anyone who could make them want to stay and work for you.”

“Okay,” Karen said after a moment. She didn’t believe it, but Frank spoke with such conviction that it wasn’t worth arguing. “Okay.”

She didn't mention that she hadn't let Tanya kill Arrey (even though she'd certainly had the right) because the violent passion on Tanya's face had reminded her so starkly of Frank's. She shook her head slightly, tired of thinking of that, and got up and headed over to the drawer. Everything had been moved over from the other room, however, and she couldn’t find what she was looking for. “Scissors. Are there scissors?”

“I know where they are. What do you need 'em for?”

“I’ve been meaning to do it since this morning, but we got sidetracked by finding out about Amy and the rest. I’m going to cut my hair, Frank. Every time the breeze moves it, I think it's someone’s behind me who's about to push me to the ground.” Karen realized she was gabbling. “Besides, we’re going to be short on shampoo sooner than we thought, with the new people. I think I’ll ask the rest to do the same when we wake up tomorrow morning.”

Frank was nodding. “Yeah. Makes sense.” He looked to the side for a moment, and returned his gaze to Karen. “Want me to do it? Although I can’t promise I’ll do well.”

She’d been hoping he’d offer. “Yes, please.”

Frank lit one of the candles Helena had brought. It felt oddly ritualistic in that light: Karen silent on a stool with her eyes closed as Frank sheared her hair to fit an even line close to her neck. At this length, it curled a little and tickled her ear. By the end the floor was covered in a carpet of gold wire. Karen was a little astonished at how much of it there was. It had been so long since she'd cut it.

“You won’t be winning any beauty shows,” Frank observed, coming around and looking at her face. “But it’s neat, it’s short… unless you want it shorter?”

Karen looked at the mirror, a little taken aback by the person she found there. Her face looked a lot sharper than she remembered, more drawn. “No, this is fine. Thank you, Frank.”

They swept at the floor with their hands, grabbing hair by the handful and putting it in the trash. When they were almost done, Frank lifted a thin sheaf of the stuff off the floor and wound it around his fingers, looking a little melancholy. “You want to keep any of it?”

“I don’t see any reason to,” Karen replied, after considering it.

Frank nodded and finished cleaning up. But he didn’t remove the hair he already had twisted around his hand. Karen didn’t notice — she was practically asleep on her feet already. When she collapsed into bed she didn’t see him unwind the locks from his fingers and fold it into the Bible that was in every room of the inn, and place it back into the drawer next to his bed.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Winter came and went.

Between September and December, the bit of Logran that belonged to Karen and Frank gained twenty two dogs, seventy-something people, and about half a square mile. Between December and February, that became forty seven dogs, two hundred and fifty people, and two square miles — not all of it used for anything in particular, but free of zombies.

It started with the immediate family of Tanya and the other women Karen had invited in, all of whom gratefully accepted Karen’s terms. They were all willing to work, to cook and clean and build and farm, they just didn’t have direction. Suddenly there were a dozen hands to do the work that needed to be doe. And then two dozen. And then three…

It was touch and go for a while, especially when the influx of food didn’t keep up with the influx of people. Preserved goods, scrounged from every inch of Logran and rationed carefully, kept them going. So did the local game. But it was apparent to everyone that they’d need to start farming when spring rolled around, and that was what they did — there were a fair number of people who knew how to farm, like Helena’s brother and some of the older folks from Logran. The knowledge they didn’t have they got from some of the dustiest books in Logran’s small public library. When the ice cracked on farmable land, there were people waiting with hoes.

But that wasn’t just it. There were electricians and doctors, plumbers and mechanics, who found themselves more valued than ever. Bikes suddenly became some of the most expensive things in Logran — good for transporting small goods and running errands, good for hopping onto and getting away from an unexpected wave of zombies. A certain number of them were immediately allocated to cleaners, people whose task it was to venture into Logran proper every day and clear it of zombies. Logran wasn’t anything like New York, but it was challenging enough to go to house after house, not knowing what you’d find inside. It was a depressing and difficult job, and while Karen offered it to people whose past occupations hadn’t prepared them for anything that was useful just then, she also made it clear to them that it was an important task they’d be appreciated for. A wild mix of people became cleaners — janitors and lawyers, programmers and librarians, equipped with helmets and gloves and guns.

The survivors from Logran were the first to come to Winters Inn when the weather started getting cold, but by New Year almost all of the newcomers were from the road, coming from the surrounding towns or the next county over, finding Logran by word of mouth. All of them looked at Karen and Frank like they were in charge. Karen was so preoccupied with figuring out how to feed them and what work they could do, that by the time she thought to explain that she was just some New Yorker who’d sort of inherited the inn because she and Frank were the only people around… she sort of _was_ in charge.

It turned out that the most important part of being in charge was knowing when to turn people away. After the first troublemaker, Karen established that everyone would be accepted provisionally, but could be expelled instantly if they caused trouble in the first month. After that two thirds of the non-provisional members had to vote to expel them, after hearing a summary of the arguments for or against the contested newcomer. Maybe about one in seven or eight had to kicked out — for not working, or starting fights, or kicking dogs.

The dogs were sacrosanct. Amy had collected about eight abandoned pet dogs in her first two weeks at the inn, and Frank had let her keep on taking them when she’d started training them to bark in the presence of zombies. And then everyone started remembering that these adorable, ornamental animals were really very cooperative _wolves_ , and they’d started using them for herding cattle or guarding houses.

“Almost as if they were bred for it,” Frank said sardonically to Karen the first time he heard someone remark on their usefulness, making her laugh.

Sometime in late December, it became clear that Frank and Karen needed to move closer to the center of the town to keep things running smoothly. They moved out of the inn and into one of the smaller abandoned houses in the clear part of Logran, where the second bedroom was converted into an armory and storeroom, its bed moved into the bedroom which Karen and Frank shared.

They agreed on this almost without speaking about it — although they had their own beds, they’d been sleeping in the same room for months, by then. Karen slept better when Frank was around, and she suspected the reverse was true as well. Neither had nightmares every night anymore.

The downside was that it was now widely known that Frank and Karen were married. Karen had opened her mouth to correct people the first time she’d heard this, but then she’d remembered that she and Frank had been sharing a room as long as anyone here had known them — and also that this wasn’t New York. She’d apologized to Frank when people started calling him ‘Mr. Page’, because it was a misconception she hadn’t corrected. The guilt chilled her: she wasn’t Frank’s wife. Frank’s wife was dead.

“I don’t mind it,” Frank said, looking surprised. “It’s good that they don’t associate ‘Mr. Page’ with ‘Frank Castle, death row’.”

Then he looked at her face, and figured out what she was thinking. “I don’t mind it,” he repeated. “A name’s just a name, ma’am. Unless… unless _you_ mind? I guess it does limit your opportunities —“

“I really _like_ men not hitting on me,” Karen said fervently. It was amazing what having a husband who was known to be a dead shot did for unwanted advances.

“—and I’m not what you’d call a catch,” Frank finished.

Karen opened her mouth to disagree, and caught herself right before an awkward compliment could slip out. “You’re all right,” she said instead, and instantly felt embarrassment so deep that she smiled at him and left the room as if the conversation had come to a natural end. She clapped a hand to her mouth in the hallway, feeling like she’d given something away, even though there’d been nothing to give away at all.

Was there?

Was it was possible to be so tangled up with a person a number of weird levels that being in love with him came as a (surprising, remarkable) afterthought rather than the culmination of a relationship? Frank had happened to her in the reverse order of a person: before Karen had even met him she’d intruded into the graveyard of his home and touched his most sacred memories. After that he’d saved her life a couple of times, and had chosen her to have guardianship of his… soul, she supposed. Then they’d started setting roots together in Logran, building a kind of household — they’d even had a couple of dogs. And now.

And now _what_? Frank didn’t return her feelings. Karen’t wasn’t even certain what her feelings were. _There_ was none of that happy headiness she’d felt on her first date with Matt, or the fluttery adoration of her first long term relationship. There was rock solid trust, compassion, and a… fierce tender protectiveness. Behind the physical invincibility and the raw wounds that were the most noticeable parts of him, there was a person — dry, funny, kind, centered. It had come out in rare flashes when she’d first met him, but away from New York and everything there that had kept him trapped into the person he’d been when she’d met him, it was now almost all of him. Especially in private, where he became more open, opinionated. She felt protective of that man, and fiercely defensive against anything that threatened submerge him again. But that of course was not necessarily love.

Karen looked down at her hands and thought hard. She tested out in her head the idea of kissing him — no, too big. Kissing his hands. Yes, he had nice sturdy hands, the fingers coarse and warm, the backs covered with wiry dark hair. They’d tickle her lips if she pressed her mouth to one. The knuckles would be rough with scars. Then she’d turn one around and touch her lips to the fluttering pulse on the inside of his wrist, pumped by a heart too stubborn to stop.

…Well, all right, she was physically attracted to him. Sure. It was easy. He was a good looking guy, in a blunt sort of way. Those dark intense eyes, expressive if you knew what to look for. It wasn’t hard to want to have sex with Frank. That of course was not necessarily love.

Karen shook her head impatiently. Frivolous stuff. Stash it.

She went to prepare for her biweekly meet and greet with newcomers to the town. The trickle was steady now, word of Logran having spread to surrounding towns. Seven new people had arrived in the past three days: a young couple and their two year old girl, two tired-looking brothers who’d biked in the previous night, and two loners. Karen knew that one of the brothers had been a farmhand somewhere, but didn’t know much about the rest.

She liked to meet and do a small task with every newcomer, scoping them out and welcoming them to Logran while teaching them a useful skill. It helped her evaluate what job sector they should be put in — often past occupations weren’t enough information, because people had all sorts of odd experiences and skills that they didn’t realize were useful. She had a linguistics professor working as a nutritionist in Logran, just because he’d done nutrition research in his undergrad before he’d switched majors. He’d been a little indignant about that at first, but recently he’d confessed to Karen that he found it a more fulfilling job than lecturing. This was common feedback, actually.

The newcomers met her in her house. Their dogs milled around the new people, sniffing them happily. “Max! Tank!” Karen called them back. “Sorry about them,” she added to the six people standing in her living room.

“Oh no,” said one wistfully. “I love dogs.”

“Any experience training them?”

“Just as a shelter volunteer,” he said, and Karen mentally allocated him to the overworked team of Logran’s dog trainers unless he turned out to have an even more useful skill.

“Excellent,” she said, and turned to the rest of them. “Welcome to Logran, everybody. My name is Karen Page. We’ll go over some ground rules for your stay here, and I’ll also be teaching you to make soap and shampoo with the yucca plants that grow here in the region. It’s a simple task, and for most part you’ll be making your own, so it’s good to learn right away.”

Everyone listened attentively as Karen laid out how things would work — their one month probationary stay, the current distribution of labor in Logran, the safe bounds of the town, the way housing worked, the penalties for theft, harassment, or other things. No one seemed to think any of it unreasonable; in fact, the young father put his head in his hands and let out a raw exhale of relief when Karen explained her policy about children. “A daycare and a _school_ ,” he said. “Incredible to be back in civilization.”

They seemed like a good batch of people. She led them into the kitchen and taught them how to peel and pulp yucca leaves and use the scrapings to produce a greenish, frothy liquid that you could wash with. “You can use the roots, too, but that’ll kill the plant, and we’re trying not to do that,” she said. “There are plenty of plants around, yes, but a town of several hundred can deplete resources very swiftly if we’re not careful.”

The room slowly loosened up as everyone got to work, clumsily peeling off the skin off their handful of leaves. Conversation started up, and Karen mostly listened, trying to get a handle on everyone. She occasionally asked a question to push the conversation into a direction she wanted, but as always everyone revealed themselves naturally enough, bubbly in their relief of finding a place with food and soap and laws.

One of them, a fragile-looking woman named Joelle who had arrived alone, was quieter than most. Karen manuevered herself to her and tried to break the ice. After the first few gentle questions, Joelle met her eyes and said in a low tone, “I understand you have reservations about newcomers, ma’am, and want to know more about me. It’s been the same way with every town I’ve been in. But I don’t intend to stay here long; I’m traveling south to find my daughter in Atlanta. I’ll stay here a week or two, to rest and earn my keep, and then I’ll be moving on. If that’s a problem I can leave right away.”

“Oh, not at all,” Karen said, startled and a little intimidated by the scope of the woman’s journey. She’d been on foot when she’d come into Logran. “Please stay as long as you wish. I… if I may ask, where did you start out?”

“Syracuse, New York,” said Joelle, and unexpectedly smiled when she saw Karen’s face. “It’s all right, I’ve made it halfway, and the worst is behind me. I should be all right if I keep to the small roads, the ones not swarming with the undead.”

“Christ,” Karen said lowly. “How have you made it?”

“I didn’t think I’d get this far,” Joelle said simply. “Making it out of the state of New York was the hardest part. But there’s a stretch of land in Pennsylvania that’s remarkably civilized, controlled by a network of towns whose trading routes are safe and clear. There’s hope yet if there are more areas like that between me and my daughter.”

“A network of towns,” Karen repeated. “How far away?”

Joelle shrugged. “The one I left from was three or four days away with a good bike. But someone stole the one I had, so I’ve been on the road for the last ten days. Heard about this place two days ago and changed directions, seeing as I was running out of food.”

“I think I can get you another bike,” Karen said quietly. “It won’t be a good one, seeing as —“

“It’ll probably be stolen again. I understand.” Joelle looked a little touched, she looked down at the froth of yucca soap in her hands and smiled. “You’re a good-hearted young woman. I’ll remember you.”

Something about that exchange overwhelmed Karen. She was still thinking about it when she retired that night. Frank was already in his bed, perusing a book on urban planning. He raised an eyebrow when he saw her face. “Something wrong?”

“No-o,” she said, plopping down on her bed and staring out of the window. “You think I could requisition one of the worse bikes from you this week for good?”

Frank set down the book. “What for?”

She explained. Twenty seconds in, he was nodding. “Of course,” he said. “Have her come around to the bike shop tomorrow. I’m free early afternoon; I can find something her size and fix a crate on the back to carry food and water in. We have crates to go around. If she needs a map to find the better roads, too, we have plenty unused copies.”

Frank said this matter-of-factly, as if giving away resources to a woman making a near-impossible journey to find a girl who was probably dead was the natural thing to do. The mind of a soldier and the heart of a father.

“What?” he said, when Karen just kept looking at him.

“I’m glad I didn’t need to have to argue for her,” she said, slowly.

He shrugged. “She’s looking for her daughter. What’s a bike and a map, for the world?”

That had been Karen’s thinking. “Yes,” she said, as if the discussion was over, and turned her face away so he wouldn’t see it. Yes. Of course just being protective of someone and wanting to sleep with them wasn’t necessarily love. But being, also, in perfect accord on the matters like these —

“I’m about to clock out,” Frank said. “May I turn off the light?”

“Yes, of course,” she said absently. “Good night, Frank.”

“Sleep tight, ma’am.”

She lay down in the darkness and stared at the ceiling, hearing his breathing level out into sleep. It was a sound she’d gone to sleep hearing the night before and the night before that, one that she wanted to hear when she went to sleep tomorrow night, and the night after that…

Well, shit.

:::::

People coming to her for relationship advice became a peculiar agony. And there were a lot of them. Life went on, after the end of the world. Helena’s brother fell in love with a grad student who’d fled the nearest city and had found Logran in the early days. Tanya had started hanging out with a Californian named Adelie who’d been stranded in West Virginia while visiting an ailing grandparent, and had moved in with her the past month. One of Frank’s cleaners, Geoff, reunited with his estranged ex-wife, becoming the subject of Logran gossip for a few weeks before everyone got used to them.

For some reason, everyone thought Karen was a model of harmonious matrimony. “It’s just that you and Mr. Page are so perfect together,” everyone seemed to start. “I guess I just wanted to know what the secret is, because —“ and they’d launch into some problem Karen had no idea how to solve, and she’d nod and smile. It had been something of a humorous annoyance before she’d realized she might have feelings for Frank. Now it was exquisite torture.

 _The secret of a perfect relationship is to not have one_ , she couldn’t say. Neither could she admit that her last relationship had ended in a storm of gunfire and vigilantism. “I’ve found honest, open communication to be the most important thing,” she would say to her sometimes-tearful listener, trying not to look frazzled. To others, she’d say, “You know, sometimes it’s just luck, finding someone you mesh with. It may not work out for reasons beyond either of your control. You’ve got to be ready to let them go, in that case.”

After a few weeks of tailoring bullshit advice to various lovelorn parties, she broke down and complained to Frank. She’d meant not to, because she didn’t want to talk to Frank about people’s perceptions about their relationship — but it was so _frustrating_. “I mean, what do _you_ say?” Karen burst out.

Frank shrugged. “No one comes to me about this.”

She blinked. She knew that wasn’t true. At least two people who’d come to her had mentioned speaking to Frank as well. Why was he lying?—

Oh. Of course. He surely didn't felt uncomfortable about the pretense of being married, despite what he'd said, and didn’t like acknowledging the way they were viewed by the town. Karen flushed, feeling rotten. “Lucky you,” she said lightly. “Well, I’d try to find a way to get them off my back.”

Despite that all, things leveled out into something almost idyllic. The crops grew, no one went without food or work, and Karen went to sleep most nights feeling accomplished. People poured in, the land cleared of danger, and when the sun set, there was music. Almost everyone Karen met in the street she knew by name. The ache in the chest that manifested randomly when she saw Frank (feeding the dogs, teaching a new cleaner how to hold a gun, blinking as he woke up, sleep-mussed and relaxed) became almost familiar, almost a friend. And she thought: I can live with this. This is a good life. With every day that passed she began to believe that the next would be much like it, and the next week, and the next month.

Ruin came in the form of a thin, redheaded young man who cycled into Logran almost by accident, starved and delirious. He recovered with three days of food and water and sleep, and was deemed well enough to explore the town and eat with the locals in the communal dining halls. Karen was due to meet him, but had not done so yet when he changed everything.

At his second social dinner, the young man was seated at the same table as Karen and Frank Page. His guide pointed them out to him and explained who they were. When he went pale, she asked anxiously, "Do you want to go back to the infirmary? You like like you're going to faint."

"No, I'm fine," he said. "It's just — that's the Punisher!"

When the people around him paused and looked at him dubiously, he flushed and went on even more loudly, in an embarrassed panic: "He is! I did an article on him for the student paper — they never found your body in the explosion and he's  _here_! Look, he's a little thinner and his hair's long but you can see... his face is...”

He stuttered into silence. The hall was not that large, and everyone had gone quiet. People were looking at him and then at Frank Page, trying to summon up memories of news that had happened a year and a lifetime ago.

Then the murmurs started.

Karen sat at the table, feeling the world collapse under her. She looked at the gaunt, nervy-looking boy who had done it, and he shrank back. Next to her, Frank’s face was completely blank with panic. But his body betrayed him, tensing and shifting under his clothes, ready to react to a threat…

Karen touched his arm. “Stand down,” she said in an undertone. She could feel the tension leach out of him at that, like her palm was a grounding rod. Karen felt the flutter of her own breath, trapped in her throat. Damage control. Damage control. The Punisher was dead, had been dead for a year, she opened her mouth to say —

“I’ll be damned,” said someone at her table. He was peering at Frank. “The boy’s right. That _is_ Frank Castle. I thought he looked familiar when I first saw him, but I never thought about it much —”

“Holy shit,” someone else whispered. The murmurs traveled and grew.

“New York —“

“Ms. Page _is_ from —“

Karen stood, trying not to look as aghast as she felt. Heads turned to look at her, including Frank’s. He met her eyes and shook his head slightly. Cat’s out of the bag, his face seemed to say. And he was right. It would only take a newspaper clipping or two to prove it.

"Is it true?" someone at the table said.

"Yeah," said Frank. Karen stared at him in horror but could not think of any lie that would make things better. "Yeah, it is."

Someone nearby asked, “Ms. Page — did _you_ know?”

It was Tanya’s girlfriend Adelie. “Yes,” Karen said, trying not to croak. Miraculously her voice came out steady and cool, out of sheer habit. “Yes, I always knew. I was part of his legal defense team. We fled New York together. And like Frank said, if you’ve got a problem with that, you’re free to go. Anyone who does should stand up now so you can all leave together. We’ll put you on a truck with plenty of gas and food and you can start out anew wherever you want. Takers?”

Stillness. For a full minute.

Karen spread out her hands. “All right, it’s a big decision. Anyone who changes their mind should come talk to me.” Then she dropped the friendly tone and went on in a lower, slower voice: “But if you have a problem with sharing this space with Frank and try to take it out on him instead of being sensible and leaving with a nice truck full of supplies, you are done. You are over.”

She’d thought the hall was quiet _before_ …

Nervousness frothed in Karen like champagne bubbles. She considered smiling coolly and saying “Now let’s get back to dinner”. Or a friendlier “But I’m sure no one’s going to do that”. But she didn’t. She just sat back down, not moving her face from the mask it was set in. She could feel the stares on her, but didn’t dare flick her eyes back up to see what emotions were attached to them.

She resumed eating; almost no one else did for a while.

:::::

Karen retired as soon as she could without drawing comment. Frank was right behind her all the way. They didn’t speak. They didn’t argue in public: that was an unspoken rule. They went to their quarters, shoulder to shoulder, practically marching in step. Word traveled fast. Every person they passed on their way back stopped what they were doing to stare, first at Frank's face in fascination, and then inevitably to Karen's.

The spat began as soon as the door closed behind them.

“You gave people an ultimatum between accepting the Punisher as a bedfellow and throwing away their lives,” Frank said. “The rules are that people vote on whether to kick someone out, yeah?”

Her throat was so scratchy. “No one votes on _you_.”

“Listen to me,” Frank said urgently. He pointed at the door. “That, out there, that town with its cleaners and mechanics and farms — that’s the best case scenario. I got you out of New York in time, Logran’s being built up from the ground — and you’re on _top_. People listen to you and they respect you and half the people out there would give their lives for you. You can’t throw that away for me. Don’t throw that away for me. People, they turn so easy if you push ‘em. Don’t push ‘em over me.”

"You deserve to be here. They are not forcing you out."

"I'm saying I can leave before they can have the chance."

Karen couldn't stop shaking her head. "No. No. You are worth everything. If they won’t have you, I won’t have them.”

Frank looked stricken. “ _Ma’am_. You don’t need to do this. This — loyalty — if you’re doing this out of a sense of debt, you _know_ that everything you owe me you’ve paid back in full.”

Karen crossed her arms. “It’s not a sense of debt, Frank. You’re my friend, you’re my partner in running this town. You are not negotiable.”

He was shaking his head. “You haven’t needed me. Not for months, not really. I haven’t even had to pull out a gun on anyone in four or five months. The town’s on its feet, everything’s running smoothly, the cleaner crew is equipped to deal with any likely threat in the area. And… you know I can make it out there on my own, right? I can make it _easy_. Probably even find a new place, not in this state, but… maybe that cluster of towns up in Pennsylvania that some travelers tell us about.”

“Frank,” Karen said very calmly, feeling everything coming apart underneath her skin. “Please. Understand. I am in love with you. I’m not telling you this in some stupid, panicky attempt to make anything happen between us, I have no illusions about that. But I need you to get that this town means little to me if you are not here, and especially if they force you to leave. A place that wrongs you is not a place I want to stay and manage and protect.”

“No.” Frank’s reaction was worse than she had imagined. At the worst she’d expected embarrassment, or pity. She had not expected horror. “ _No_. Ma’am, you cannot.”

She crossed her arms, trying to look unbruised by his reaction. “I do and feel what I want, Frank. Sorry.”

He sat down on the bed and buried his face in his hands. “ _God_ ,” he exhaled through clenched teeth. “And me here, some fool’s puppet, yeah.”

Karen had no idea what he was talking about. She ignored him and plowed on. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal. This doesn’t change anything. I told you so you’d understand that I’m not doing this out of — debt, or need.”

He barked out a bitter laugh. “Doesn’t change anything!”

“Work with me here, Frank,” Karen snapped. “Make some sense here. Talk to me. We can’t figure out what our next move is until you explain why you’re so disgusted at the thought of my being attracted to you — an attraction which, by the way, I’ve _never_ let interfere with our work or our friendship —“

“I’m not disgusted,” Frank said in a strained, calm voice. “You have ghastly taste, but I’m not disgusted. No. It’s just the feeling of having carried a torch for miles and miles in the dark and... having the sun come up.”

Karen stared at him. Had he just said —

Frank looked at the floor wretchedly.

“You disaster of a man,” she said at last. “You couldn’t have made this any easier, could you?”

“I’m no good for you,” he said. “It was the right thing to do, to hide it.”

“Yes,” she said in disgust. “I’m no good, you say. Stay away from me, you say. And off you go following me around, breaking into my car and walloping men to death for threatening me. There’s a disconnect here, would you say?”

Frank flushed. “That was _once_ , I wasn’t exactly following _you_ , it’s just that the Blacksmith was bound to try to get you again eventually.“

“Please!” she shouted, and actually shoved at him. It was like trying to shove a boulder. Frank was just about as tall as she was, but he was built solidly and instinctively stood in a way that was hard to unbalance. He caught her wrists, almost absently.

“I’m sorry,” he said humbly. “Ma’am, it's just that I was trying not to insult you or hurt you —“

"You're very stupid," Karen said tartly, and kissed him.

Something changed in the air, like a reversal of an electric current. Frank made a beautiful surprised noise, and she pushed him again. This time, in his shock, his knees gave. They both sort of staggered back onto the bed, Frank’s bed, where he landed with an _oof_. She landed somewhat on top of him, half-straddling him. They looked at each other for a breathless second.

Karen cleared her throat, and said softly: “Say you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Say that you want me.”

Frank’s eyes were very dark under his lashes. “ _I want you._ ”

“Say,” Karen stumbled. “Say —“

“I love you,” he said immediately, and pulled her down on him properly so he could kiss her.

There was no question of more _talking_. They both knew, immediately, that they were going to fuck. It was just going to happen. Karen could feel Frank’s erection in his pants as point of thick hard pressure against her thigh. He was unhooking her bra underneath her shirt as she bent her head and started kissing his neck. He smelled incredibly good, skin-smell and yucca soap and the faint salt of new sweat. She sat up to struggle out of her bra and shirt at once as he undid his belt, except he got distracted halfway when he noticed her breasts. His eyes widened gratifyingly.

“Mother of God,” he said. And somehow within a second he was on top of her, running his tongue against her nipples as she gasped and stared up at the ceiling. He was undoing her pants at the same time, which didn’t seem quite fair, but now he was biting gently, alternating the bites with short hard sucks. Karen’s body was electric with it. Jesus, she was so wet. She was so embarrassingly wet —

Frank pulled her pants down, and saw. “Ma’am,” he said hoarsely. “Would you let me —“

“Yes, yes,” Karen said, and kept saying it when he bent his head and started running his tongue up and down her slit. No teasing or taking it slow. It was just happening now. “Yes, please, _yes_ …”

He was good at it. Of course he was good at it. He slid two fingers into her and curled them while working on her clit with his tongue, and she could feel his smile when she started shaking a little, trying not to buck her hips into his face. “Do it if you like,” he said. “Do whatever you like.”

“Christ,” she gabbled. “Um.”

She had two orgasms in quick succession in the first ten minutes, something that had happened only a few times in her life, even with masturbation. She wasn’t really a multiple orgasms person. After the second one, she got up, dizzily euphoric, and motioned him to take her place. “Take your pants off,” she said.

“Oh,” said Frank, looking pretty dazed. “If you want —“

“I do want,” Karen said.

Frank Castle had a nice thick cock, curving out a nest of wiry dark hair. There was a little bit of precum dewing at the tip. Karen stared at it for a few seconds, and Frank shifted. When she looked at his face he’d gone a little red. “What?” he said.

“It’s so… so strange to want something so strongly. I was kind of savoring it.”

He licked his lips. “Please,” he said.

“If you say so,” she said nicely. She bent over and licked the bit of precum off the head of his cock.

He made a hoarse noise, his entire body wrenching. “Sshh,” she said absently, before taking all of him in.

Frank was wonderfully responsive. He wasn’t very loud, but when Karen did something particularly good, his entire body betrayed him. The muscles of his stomach, the tensing of his thighs, the spread of his legs. When Karen curled a hand gently around his balls, she saw his toes curl. It was like playing a rare, valuable instrument. The goal was the long quiet groan — no, the punctuated gasp. No, the sound of the sheets crinkling in his hand as he fisted them, desperate for control.

“Stop,” he gasped at one point. Karen backed off immediately, concerned. He added, “Won’t make it if you keep doing that. Give me a second.”

Karen, compassionately, gave him ten. She watched him close his eyes, scrub at his face with his palms. And just when he relaxed, blinking up at her with what definitely counted as a _silly smile_ on his face, she smiled back, flung a leg over him, and slid down on him slowly, giving him a second’s warning to protest if he didn’t want her to.

Frank didn’t protest. His mouth made a perfect O shape, but he didn’t say a thing. He watched her like a man amazed as she started riding him, slowly at first to get used to the girth, and then hard enough to rattle the bed.

It was incredible, watching his face as she rode him. Karen could see his eyes squeezing shut in almost-overwhelmed pleasure, his unexpectedly soft mouth parting. He once tried to turn his face into the pillow, out of embarrassment, and Karen stopped moving immediately. “Look at me, Frank,” she said. Her voice was low and sort of throbby with pleasure; she almost didn’t recognize it.

Frank opened his eyes, gave her a wry, bashful look, and obeyed. Karen rewarded him with an immediate resumption of motion, starting to lose focus herself as the sensations of _good, thick, warm, good_ flooded through her. It was a possibility she might have a third orgasm, but she wasn’t in any hurry — she couldn’t stop looking at Frank, the sweaty dark hair clinging to his forehead, the light on the tensed tendons of his throat, the tangle of hair on his chest and arms. Finally. Finally.

At some point Frank gestured, or made some noise, that indicated that he wanted to get up. Karen slid off, lying next to him on his bed. She noted, a little self-consciously, that the hair on his groin was visibly beaded with her fluids. But the embarrassment slid away from her when Frank inclined his head, silently asking to be kissed. She obliged him, and they spent a few more minutes just doing that.

Karen couldn’t remember being happier.

“What do you want now?” she said breathlessly, after a while. “Anything you want —“

“I want,” Frank said, and stopped to think about it for a second. “I want you to turn around.”

He entered her from behind, pinning her in place with his weight and thrusting into her — excruciatingly slow at first, then speeding up until he was snapping into her so hard she had to grab a pillow to muffle her moans in. Then he stopped to pull it away from her. “Windows are closed,” he said to her, breath tickling her ear. Beneath him, Karen shivered. “Doors are locked. We have this house to ourselves, you might as well make some noise.”

So she did. She let every embarrassing noise escape her: she whimpered when he hit a good spot, gasped when he reached around and squeezed her breasts. She canted her hips up to change the angle and heard him swear lowly as he pounded into her, and he took advantage of the sudden new space between her hips and mattress to slide in a hand and rub at her swollen clit. Karen made a noise unfamiliar to herself, a choked not-scream. “About to —“ Frank said in a strained voice, speeding up, rubbing at her almost a little too hard —

Karen wasn’t sure if they came at the same time. Her third orgasm hit her just then, and she wasn’t paying too much attention to what was happening to Frank. But at some point he slowed down and stopped, and his breathing started to slow. Still in her, he traced a finger above her ear and tucked a stray lock of hair behind it.

“Oh god,” Karen muttered, when she got her breath back. He’d come in her. How reckless of them, the town was really running low on morning-after pills, certainly faster than they were running out of condoms. But that had been so incredibly good, she couldn’t find it in herself to blame anyone. “That was… that was, um. Good.”

“It was okay,” Frank agreed. And they both started laughing. Frank’s dick twitched in her once, still hard. When he made to slide out of her, she reached behind her and grabbed his hip and said, “No.”

“Okay,” he said, easing back in. “Okay.”

Eventually Frank did rise to get a towel. Karen couldn’t say when, she was nearly asleep at that point. She felt him wipe her thighs down and get in bed. She wiggled up so she could spoon him, nuzzling her face into the back of his neck. Good skin smell. Warm Frank. Hers now. Whatever Logran could throw at them tomorrow, they’d face it together. Everything was under control.

She fell asleep smiling.

:::::

Frank wasn’t there when she woke up. She hadn’t woken up like that for a while, starting with a Sunday-morning stretch into the sun, slanted high in the sky. She untangled herself from the sheets and got up to check her watch, which was on her side of the room.

On the way she caught her reflection in the mirror. The woman staring back had bed hair and the glow of having been truly well-fucked; there was a necklace of hickeys trailing around her neck and extending down to her breasts. Reflection-Karen’s face split into a dazzling grin. Yes, there was still trouble brewing, a lot of damage control to be done, but she felt up for it. She felt up for anything.

There was a glass of water and a pill next to her watch. The label said it was Levonogestrel. How thoughtful of Frank, to get it for her. They’d use condoms next time, there were still a decent supply of those in Logran, although exorbitantly expensive. No matter. It would be worth it. Karen swallowed the pill and checked the time: eleven in the morning.

Not so bad. She’d only overslept three or four hours. Karen got dressed and started downstairs, sorting out the day’s tasks in her head — and stopped short when she noticed the two people standing between the stairs and the door.

It was Madeleine Singer and Tanya Zheng. They weren’t doing anything in particular, just standing there and looking up at her. _Waiting_ for her. Karen took one look at their expressions and knew something was terribly wrong. “Madeleine, Tanya,” she said, descending the stairs. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

“It’s Mr. Page,” said Madeleine. “He called a meeting in the gathering hall an hour or two ago. He announced that you’d changed your mind and there would be a referendum on his expulsion, after all.”


	4. Chapter 4

Madeleine continued huskily, “He said he was making the announcement and not you because it wasn’t fair to force you, that he’d pay for his own mistakes.”

“Jesus Christ!” Karen exploded. Madeleine actually stepped back from her, from whatever she saw on Karen’s face. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“Actually,” said Tanya, “he told us to physically stop you from leaving if you woke up before the meeting was over. Sorry.”

Karen looked between them in dismay and betrayal. “You listened to him? Tanya. Madeleine. You _know_ Frank. You know Logran is better off with him here. And —“ And everything had just started to fall in place. But of course that was none of anyone’s business but Karen’s.

“We’ll both vote for him to stay here,” Tanya said. “And we’ll try to convince everyone who won’t to change their minds. But the vote’s got to happen.”

Karen snarled. “Respect for the democratic process?”

“No,” Madeleine said. “Because the only way Frank is going to stay in Logran without stirring up hostility or fear is if people vote on him, the vote passes, and everyone who voted against him knows that they’re outnumbered and they’ll just have to suck it up. The way political clustering and discontent works is that the people who don’t like him will gravitate towards other people who don’t like him and start thinking most _everyone_ doesn’t like him, and eventually they’ll grow bold enough to try something. And when they try something and Frank retaliates, that’s really going to be the end of Frank, or Frank-in-Logran. We have to end this now before that happens and public opinion swings against him. Right now is the best window we’re going to get for the vote to pass.”

Karen stared.

Madeleine went a little pink. “Sorry, that was a little… opinionated.”

“No, no,” said Karen. “You… really understand people, don’t you.”

“I like _groups_ of people,” Madeleine said. “Individuals are complicated, finnicky, smart. But groups of people are predictable, like… gases. Anyway, while we’ve been waiting Tanya snapped at me to stop pacing so I just sat down and copied out a rough list of everyone in Logran with a vote and tried to figure out who’s going to say yes and no or maybe, and then who’s likeliest to be convinced. I think we can pull this off. Here, take a look…”

There were about three hundred ninety people in Logran who could vote, having passed the one month probationary period. But by the next week there would be a little over four hundred. Karen knew many of them at least in passing, but pinning down what they’d think of Frank was a little beyond her. Sure, most everyone who knew Frank liked and trusted him, but their opinion of Frank Page and Frank Castle might and would diverge. So she just sat and listened to Madeleine talk.

“I’ve put check marks next to the names of everyone I think will say yes, and dashes next to everyone who may be convinced. If everyone with a dash is convinced, the vote will pass. But of course this estimate isn’t nearly as good enough as just canvassing, which we haven’t had time to do that, on account of… um, keeping guard here and making sure you wouldn’t stop Mr. Page. But once we do we need to be start convincing people right away. Helena is going to help, of course, and Jory and Kate and Bernard…”

They were interrupted by a knock on the door. Karen rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Whoever it was, she definitely didn’t want to deal with them. It had been almost a decade since she’d quit, and it had been a pretty short phase, but — “Christ. I want a cigarette.”

“Oh, I know where to get one.” Tanya sprang up, no doubt eager to get away from boring talk about votes. She opened the door and rushed out, almost banging into Karen’s visitor. He sidled in, after a second.

It was the nervous, gaunt young man who’d recognized Frank the evening before and had caused all this trouble. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he said, shrinking a little. Karen, who wasn’t even trying to be frightening, felt a little insulted. “I… I wanted to come in and apologize.”

“Ah,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Ivan Messerli,” he said wretchedly. “I didn’t mean to bring down all this trouble on the Punisher, ma’am. I wrote several articles for the Princeton student paper defending his actions in New York… took a lot of flak from the campus leftists, but I didn’t mind that. I followed his case pretty closely. I didn’t mean for him to get kicked out. I was a little out of it last night, but mostly I… I wasn’t thinking. My cousin always used to say I’d get in real trouble one day just blurting things out. I guess he was right. What I came to say was, if there’s anything I can do to help to get the vote to pass next week, I’ll do it. And anything else to make up for it. I am _very_ sorry.”

He stood there wringing his hands.

Karen looked from him to Madeleine. “I — you know what, Ivan, why don’t I let Madeleine fill you in on what we need you to do. Madeleine, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go out back and take a fifteen minute break.”

“Of course,” Madeleine said. Then she swung her attention to Ivan, looking interested. “Princeton, huh? That’s an angle we can use, even if you’re quite young. Come sit down…”

Karen headed to the back yard, which thankfully had a high wooden fence that kept anyone from seeing her bury her face in her hands and have a small panic attack. She’d gotten a few of them after killing James Wesley, and knew how to weather it. She fixed her eyes on the grass curling around her bare feet, dug her palms into the concrete step she was sitting on, and let her thoughts wander as she puffed out harsh breaths onto her knees.

It was over in twelve minutes. Good timing, because Tanya popped in, handed her a cigarette and lighter, and popped out. Karen lit it with still-shaking hands.

Ah. Perfect.

She was halfway through it when Frank came out into the yard. He sniffed the air and winced, but sat down anyway.

He peered at her. “Uh, so… how angry are you?”

They really could have been married. Karen let a bitter laugh escape her. It went a few seconds longer than she’d intended, and Frank started to look a little wary. She quoted to him, “‘My old lady, she didn't just break my heart. She'd rip it out, she'd tear it apart, feed it to a dog… she was ruthless.’”

Frank blinked. “Wow.”

“You made an impression,” she told him, and took another drag. The burning tip sizzled sharply. “Never heard love advice like that before.”

“I was wrong,” he said. “Man does that to you, run away. He’s no good. Find someone who’d, faced with the temptation, set your heart carefully on a table, and go out to have a smoke and calm down before making any rash decisions about what to do with it.”

Karen couldn’t help it. She laughed, making the smoke in front her face ripple like a veil. “Oh, Frank. Frank. I’m going to fight for you like _hell_.”

Frank held out a hand. Karen took it.

“I'm sorry,” he said quietly.

“Madeleine explained to me the political necessity of the referendum,” she said. “Were you thinking of that, when you went and called it behind my back?”

“Ah… not really. I was thinking about how not calling it threatened your safety in Logran.”

“ _Never_ do that again,” said Karen.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She took a last drag and stamped out the cigarette. He leaned in and kissed her, despite the smell. She curled her fingers into the harsh brush of his hair buzzed short at the back. His skin was so warm. It always was; he seemed to burn a few degrees hotter than everyone else.

“Come on,” she said, breaking the kiss and standing up. “I’m still mad at you, but we’ve got a campaign to run.”

:::::

It was incredible that some politicans ran a campaign trying to gain the approval of four hundred thousand or four hundred million people. Just four hundred provided stressful enough.

Karen herself didn’t engage much with anyone; she ran the town as she always had, pretending that the referendum had been her idea, pretending that the opinion of Logran’s people should be made in isolation of her, and that she wouldn’t try to influence it. Her only job for the next week, assigned to her by Madeleine, was to as competent as she could be, reminding people of the good she had done them, letting them remember that she might leave if Frank was expelled.

Frank’s job was the same; in the eight days they had left, he was visible all around town, being noticeably useful — and more importantly, nonthreatening. Madeleine assigned him dogwalking duty every day, so that he could be seen every day reminding people how long he’d been there doing the same thing without trouble. Frank was assigned Logran’s more photogenic dogs in rotation, although of course he himself could care less about the breed.

Meanwhile, the real work was done on the part of Madeleine’s core group — a number of people who had been there from very early on or had worked with Frank extensively in their time at Logran, who were willing to go out and talk to people, and convince them to vote in favor of Frank’s staying. Madeleine deftly assigned every member of the core to an overlapping group of people in Logran who might be swayed. Ivan Messerli, the Princeton kid who had exposed Frank, was assigned to approach everyone who had been an academic or upper-class before the pandemic. Tanya and Helena’s brother were assigned to talk to the several score agricultural workers in Logran. Amy, one of Logran’s nine medical personnel, tried to sway her colleagues and made her support clear to anyone who came in through her door. Logran’s cleaners, who forayed into new areas and cleared it of zombies, were almost unified in their approval of Frank, who had saved all of their lives in one way or another.

All these people together formed a support bloc that seemed almost guaranteed to make the vote pass; after a few days it became clear that they had half of the vote for sure, mostly from people who had been in Logran for at least four months, and the other sixteen percent seemed securable. “But just passing isn’t enough,” said Madeleine in one meeting, four days before the vote. “The goal is _overwhelming_ support — enough to demonstrate to opponents that they can’t make a move, that they should let the issue go. We’re aiming for seventy five to eighty percent. That’s the number we need for Mr. Page to remain in Logran unquestioned, unmolested.”

After the meeting Karen took her aside. “Madeleine. Let me say first that I’m incredibly grateful for your support. But I just… I guess I want to know — why? This is all you’ve been working on in the past few days. I never knew you cared about Frank that much. I’m touched.”

Madeleine gave her a look Karen wasn’t used to these days, an incredulous you’ve- _got_ -to-be-kidding face. “With all due respect to Mr. Page, ma’am, I’m doing this for _you_.”

“Oh,” said Karen. This was rather more devotion than she’d ever known she’d inspired.

“Well, if he was expelled, you’d leave Logran with him, wouldn’t you?”

Karen blinked. She supposed she would. She hadn’t thought about it, but… of course. There seemed to be no other option. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have the skills to survive outside of Logran, especially if she had Frank with her. “Yes.”

“Who do you think would take your place if you left?”

Karen didn’t really have to think about it. “Oliver Teague, I guess. Or Marcel Kitchen. Or Nikki Harman. All three of them are pretty… competent or popular.”

“None of them are both,” said Madeleine. “All right, Teague’s a smart good man, he’d make the right calls. But if you appointed him and stepped down, Harman and Kitchen and maybe Villanueva are going to be undermining him, plus fighting among themselves. Ma’am, do you think politics gets any _cleaner_ when the pool is so small? Say Kitchen wins, because he’s likeliest to — everyone likes him, he’s a local and engineers are popular. What do you think _Kitchen’s_ going to do to Logran? You think he’ll care as much as you do? You think he’ll bother to get to know every newcomer?”

Karen folded her arms. “Right, then. So… what about Villanueva? She’s smart, she’s driven…”

“We need a white person,” Madeleine said bluntly. Her comment made Karen acutely conscious of the racial divide between them. The past few months, it had seemed to Karen that things like race or money mattered less since the pandemic, the same way it didn’t really matter who won a marathon when everyone’s legs were broken. But of course that didn't mean those divisions were gone. “Noemí Villanueva’s not even white-passing. Eighty or eighty five percent of Logran is white. They’re not going to vote for her. Not because they don’t _like_ her, everyone likes Noemí, she’s funny and she’s done a fantastic job marshaling Logran’s scant medical resources into a working clinic. But they’re going to want someone who looks like them in charge, consciously or not, same way people back home probably wouldn’t have voted for a white or Asian running for mayor. If it can’t be Teague, it’s got to be Harman, but not enough people like Harman…”

Madeleine paused, peering at Karen. “You know, it’s a little disappointing you haven’t thought about this.”

Karen scrubbed at her face. There had been a lot going on. Like starting sleeping with Frank, which despite everything was soaringly good. Like having to perform at her job at 120%. “I’m sorry. Yes. I should have.”

Madeleine waved her hand. “It’s been a trying few days. Moot point if you’re not kicked out. But you understand _why_ we need you here. Everyone who might succeed you, individually, is decently qualified. But they’re going to be nipped at the heels every day by people who think they can do better. No one does that to you. That authority alone makes you worth your weight in gold to those of us here who understand what’ll happen if you leave. Especially to people who don’t fit in perfectly, like me or Tanya or her girfriend, who might be the first to be left out in the cold if things get hard, if there’s not enough food, or people need someone to blame for things going wrong.”

“Oh,” Karen said in a small voice. “I… I feel like such an ass. I’m sorry, Madeleine. You’re completely right.”

“And that,” Madeleine said, “is why I’m fighting so hard for Frank to stay unquestioned in this town.”

:::::

The afternoon before the vote, Madeleine pored over her list again and shook her head. “It's hard to pin it down at this point, because most of the undecided people have clammed down, trying to avoid arguing with anyone. But we’ve reached seventy, yes. Plausibly seventy-five.”

Karen was exhausted and hungry. Frank had left the room for dinner, and she wanted to join him. “Wasn’t seventy-five our goal?”

“I find myself ambitious,” said Madeleine. “I’m about to propose something a little crazy. Let’s… not make Geoff speak for Frank.”

The vote would take place after everyone heard the arguments for and against Frank, presented by two speakers. The rules regarding the arguments were loose, with a fifteen-minute cutoff, so as to not waste anyone’s time. Karen herself usually sat as judge, albeit one who rarely interfered except when someone was blatantly lying. This time she’d abstained and passed on the job to Noemí Villanueva, who in the past week had famously stayed impartial. It was a decision that reflected favorably upon Karen, and had the effect of removing Villanueva’s neutral vote from the pool and adding in hers. It was a not-trivial decision for such a small pool of votes.

The speaker against Frank was Logran's archivist and schoolteacher Josh Babock, who had been one of the most strident malcontents since Frank had been exposed. He had two qualifications that made Karen afraid: first, he had been a lawyer before the pandemic, and apparently a pretty good one. Second, he was a man of principle. Whatever charges he laid against Frank the next morning would be coming from deepset beliefs, not from greed or hatred. Against Babock, Madeleine and Karen had chosen Geoffrey Benbow, a good looking, universally well-liked, articulate cleaner who had worked with Frank for months now. He’d been practicing the speech Madeleine had given him for three days now, and had it pitch-perfect. Karen had no doubt in his performance.

“If not Geoff, who?” said Karen, puzzled.

“You.”

Karen laughed. “You’re crazy. I’m his… his…”

“You’re the woman who leashed the Punisher. Everyone knows he defers to you. It was a kind of joke before everyone found out who he was: Mrs. Page, she’s so nice, but she has that big man _whipped_. I’ve just been turning it over my head, the past day or two, and…”

“Geoff’s _impartial_ ,” Karen burst out. “I’m the one who announced to the entire town that they could take him or walk out.”

“Right. Geoff’s not married to him,” Madeleine said. “But he was Mr. Page’s subordinate. Whatever claim people can make about you and him, it’s not that he’s brainwashed you or threatened you, or that you’re his puppet. Remember, this isn’t an actual court, character witness is by itself a complete defense.”

Karen threw her hands up. “What do I even say out there? I know this man, I love this man. He is useful, he is kind. Let him stay.”

“But that’s exactly what you say.” Madeleine pointed at the list again. “Listen. Of those who are voting against him tomorrow, over half are… family people. People for whom this stuff _matters_. You were part of his legal defense, once upon a time in New York. How did you transition from defending him to becoming his lover? What transformed him from ravening revenger to quiet family man?”

“Family man!”

“Well, he does keep nine dogs,” Madeleine pointed out. “I think those add up to two point three children. Listen. You can say no. It’s just that… here’s a preliminary speech.”

Like her, Madeleine’s print was neat and prickly-sharp. Karen read the script twice. “This isn’t stuff I’d say.”

“This is stuff you have to say eventually. If you want to keep him there. So why not say it to a hall full of people rather than justifying yourself individually over and over again?”

Karen stared down, ideas flaring in her mind like fireworks. She was silent for a few minutes. Then she said, “If so, we need to add a few things. Some of these details aren’t quite right.”

:::::

Although Karen was very briefly tempted to go ahead and speak for Frank without telling him about the switch, as payback, the speech she intended to make referenced a few personal details about him that she needed permission to use. She approached Frank in the evening after dinner and told him about Madeleine’s plan. His mouth went grim and unhappy, but he’d promised her after calling the referendum that he’d defer to her on any decision she made about the campaign. He crossed his arms and let out a disgruntled noise of affirmation.

The rest of that night, and a few snatched hours early in the morning, were devoted to practicing her speech. An hour before Karen was due to give it, Madeleine came by with a bagful of clothes.

“You want to look tired but fiery,” said Madeleine. “I mean, you normally do, so it’s not hard, but even more than usual. You don’t want to wear makeup, no one does these days, but the right dress…”

It had been a while since Karen thought about dresses. No one did those very much these days either. She’d been intending to wear a dark gray pantsuit, a nice piece of formalwear someone had left behind in their desertion of Logran. “Nice,” Madeleine said about it, “but we could do better.”

She ended up putting Karen in a simple white dress and blue jacket. Karen’s hair wasn’t quite long enough to tie back, but she had pinned some of it back. Madeleine said it was good. “Should I wear heels?” Karen said.

“Oh yes,” Madeleine said. “We’re going for the beleaguered avenging angel look.”

Karen tottered to the city hall, effortlessly looking beleaguered. She arrived ten minutes early, but the hall was almost full, a sea of voices and eyes. They hushed when Frank arrived a few minutes after her, in the same sort of work clothes he always wore. This too was Madeleine’s design; Frank needed to look as familiar as possible. He strode forward and sat at the front of the room, in a comfortable chair facing the audience. Behind him was Noemí Villanueva, taking Karen’s normal seat.

Villanueva tapped at her table for order, right on time. “Let’s make this as clean and orderly as possible,” she said. “We’re going to hear from Josh Babock speaking for Frank Page’s expulsion. Then we’re going to hear from Karen Page, speaking against it.”

There was a wave of whispers; everyone had been expecting Geoff. Geoff himself sat at the front of the hall, sending Karen a reassuring smile.

“There will be an opportunity for Mr. Babock to quickly refute any points, and after that we’ll be taking a vote as always. The entire process will be over within the hour. We all have work to do, so please, let’s proceed. Please come and speak, Mr. Babock.”

Babock nodded sharply and rose. He was in a suit that was a little loose for him, but he still had the same air as a lot of wealthy lawyers Karen had seen in her time at Nelson & Murdock: quick-moving, unblinking. “Let’s get right to it, then.

“I care about Logran’s safety. I’ve been living in this county for twenty-eight years — for most of that time it’s been an amazing place, full of kind, god-loving people. I arrived here three months ago, and I’ve had time to observe for myself that Karen Page is a good woman who cares about this town and its people. I think we’d all agree that we’re grateful for what she’s done for us. But just because she’s a good woman doesn’t mean we have to accept everyone she vouches for.

“The town I come from, about fifteen miles away, I left with my sister and niece because the men who were running it had gone mad. They were the men who’d gotten their hands on the guns first, and they thought they could do whatever they liked. At first they didn’t do too badly with managing things, but then the food started running out. People tried to take the rations in the storehouse they were guarding; they were shot to death. And a lot of other people were killed simply because they were disliked, or they had wronged one of the men with guns years ago. My son, he made a mistake eight years ago with another man’s wife. I saw his brains shot out on my kitchen floor the night before I left.”

Babock had a peculiarly effective way of speaking that involved being very still, standing a little stooped with his hands clasped behind his back and his face tilted towards the floor. He looked almost confessional, like he was saying something difficult to push out. And then, at important beats, he’d look up and blink up at his audience like he was surprised they were there. Perhaps it was theatrical. Perhaps it was his way of speaking of a difficult subject. Karen knotted her hands under the table and tried not to hate him.

“I don’t mean to use shock to make my point. Something like that wouldn’t shock most of you here anyhow. I just want to demonstrate why this matters to me, that we be rigorous about excluding those who would undermine the laws that hold us together. It is more important than ever that we be choosy about the people who lead us and who work with us. The man whose membership we are debating today killed over fifty people in New York last year. Those men were people. They had families. Children. I have no doubt they did horrible things, but it is not for one man to decide what the price must be paid for those things. The law _matters_ , ladies and gentlemen. It sounds so trite, but we must not overestimate important truths because they sound trite. Now more than ever we must be vigilant that we don’t fall to the same disease that has gripped communities all over the country and, I assume, all over the world: the temptation to think that the rule of law is gone and its judgments are now ours to make.

“I ask you: if Frank Castle started thinking that way when the world was still standing, how can we trust him to live among us when the world has fallen?”

Babock went on in this vein for a few more minutes and finished early. His brevity was not a weakness; he’d said all he wanted to say. The room was silent when he took his seat again.

Villanueva’s voice was crystalline. “Thank you, Mr. Babock. Please come and speak, Mrs. Page.”

“Miss,” said Karen, rising. “Miss Page. Frank and I are not married.” She could feel Madeleine wincing behind her. “Frank had a wife, Maria Castle, who was killed two years ago. I find it disingenuous, now that it’s no longer necessary to conceal his surname, to pretend she doesn’t exist. She and Frank had two children — Lisa and Frank Jr. Castle — and I mention this because their murder is where the story begins.”

From there she segued naturally to Madeleine’s script, which was inscribed into her bones at this point. “All of us know two societies. The one we were born to, and the one we built from the ground up after. We all know now that the formation of a community is no simple thing; that it takes trade, labor, knowledge, and trust in justice. Many of us didn’t know, before the pandemic, what it was like to fall in between the cracks and realize that the compacts that hold society together are _made-up things,_ that justice isn’t something that comes out of the sky, that it’s something we build together and enforce. We all know what it’s like to have our power fail on us, for people to come into our homes and demand food and medicine and money, and to know that there is nothing anybody will do about it because the organizations that did those things were suddenly _gone_.”

Karen could see the unconscious sway of agreement in her audience.

“Two years before the rest of us, Frank saw the murderers of his family walk away. The state law enforcement chose to cover up the whole thing, because there were factors that would have embarrassed and implicated them if it came to life. They tried to kill Frank himself. I know this because I was there when the woman responsible for the decisions that led to his children’s deaths admitted everything, right before she was shot and killed by the men who were trying to stop the investigation into their drug ring. Many of their actions were attributed to Frank, because he was loose at the time. They came for me as well, and he saved my life, even though it could have easily led to his arrest.” That wasn’t _quite_ true, but… “He saved my life one more time after his alleged death, when I was kidnapped by the leader of the same drug ring and about to be killed for what I knew about them. There I begged Frank not to kill the man, but didn’t convince him; he’d finally found the man responsible for his family’s murders. I was disgusted. I walked away from him for good.”

She could hear the leaves rustle outside the hall, past the locked doors — it was that quiet.

“A number of months after that, he came to my apartment in New York in the early days of the pandemic and convinced me to leave the city with him. I listened. We drove here, where we started preparing for what was going to come. That preparation forms the core of what the town is today. I remained wary of him; I owed him my life several times over and he was nothing but helpful and gracious in Logran, but what he had done in New York hung between us. And then, within a few weeks of our arrival, I took my first life.” Karen felt no guilt about lying; she owed these people a lot of things, but an explanation of her rawest secrets wasn’t one of them. “He was a local named Martin Arrey. Many of you know who he was and what he did, what he intended to do to me. I did not enjoy killing him; I did it as quickly and mercifully as I could. We all knew he would come back for us if we let him go. What was unthinkable to me a month ago had become necessary, and that was when my last reservation about Frank Castle disappeared.”

She looked at Frank, who was wearing the same impassive face he’d worn for most of his trial. Back then she and Matt and Foggy had assumed he was being uncooperative. Now that she knew him better, she knew it was discomfort with having so many people look at him. He didn’t know how to deal with that too well, and locked down.

“All of us here have known moments like that — when your unthinkable became your necessary. It may have been killing and eating a household pet. It may have been prostitution. And like me, it may have been murder. Babock questions why Frank found it so easy to ignore the rule of law when the world was still standing: my answer is that it had abandoned him, same as it abandoned us. It just left him a little sooner. The law isn’t something we pledge ourselves to like a religion. The law is a pact. We owe little to it if it deserts us.

“Frank is on trial not for any infraction he’s made in Logran. His behavior here has been immaculate — he is on trial for his past. I ask those of you who are scared of him, angry at him, to consider whether it is _you_ who are scared or angry — or the retained memory of your past self who passed easy judgments over the Sunday paper, eating hot breakfast in the safety of your home. Scrub those judgments clean. Start over as the person you are right now, the person for whom the unthinkable became necessary. And recognize that those experience make him your brother.”

Karen had been nervous about speaking to all of Logran, gathered here in judgment. But now that she was here, the words just flowed out of her. She realized something, in the space between heartbeats as she paused and swept her gaze across her audience: her voice was different. Over the past half year she’d gotten used to having to pitch her voice to reach across large farms or rowdy eating halls, to make announcements or issue warnings. She’d trained that voice into a ringing thing infused with the kind of authority that reached into people’s hindbrains and made them pay attention, because the teacher was speaking.

She was using it now. She sounded _great_.

Karen discreetly checked the clock at the back of the room to make sure she was pacing herself right, and went on to review the major things Frank had down for the town, pointing out how his efforts underpinned its stability. Frank shuffled uncomfortably in his chair, but no one was looking at him, which was good.

With two minutes to go, Karen paused. The last part was the trickiest, a veer in tactics. She let the silence go on for about five seconds, and said, in a quieter tone that forced everyone to concentrate a little to hear:

“When I first arrived in this town, Frank and I were not lovers. We just stuck together for survival, and didn’t correct anyone who thought differently. I won’t be spilling the details of my personal life here now, but I think all of you know that the situation has changed. I love this man. I know that some of you are not convinced by the evidence that he’s done good for this town and the knowledge that he’s been a model citizen during his time here. So I am asking you to take my word for it. Take my word for it that his quest for vengeance ended last year when he finally found the man responsible for his family’s deaths. Take my word for it that he is not so different from you. Take my word for it that he deserves to be here.

“I love this man. I want to wake up next to him every morning for the rest of my life. And I place it in your hands whether that will happen for us. Thank you.”

Noise from the audience, positive or negative, was banned in these proceedings. Karen had no idea if she’d gotten through to anyone and changed their minds, whether she’d sounded maudlin or dignified. Her heart hammering, she took her seat. Frank had his head bent to his lap. Karen knew he wasn’t crying, but it might appear to others that he was. Probably for the best. Frank wasn’t good at playing a crowd.

Villanueva tapped at her table. “Thank you, Miss Page. Mr. Babock, you have three minutes to make any quick rebuttals. Do you wish to speak?”

Babock stared into space for a few seconds and said quietly, “No, ma’am.”

Villanueva nodded. “Then we vote.”

People filed out of the two doors of the meeting hall, dropping scraps of paper into boxes on their way out. In past votes, most people had left at that point to return to their usual tasks, electing to hear the decision later that day through word of mouth. They also had the option of waiting in the lobby or around the building to hear the decision made.

Today, almost everyone waited.

The votes were counted by both speakers and the judge. When everyone had left, Karen approached Villanueva’s table for the count, along with Babock. Villanueva unfolded every vote and made a mark in her notebook for each one — yes, no, abstain — as Babock and Karen watched. Frank remained in his chair, facing away from them, not speaking. Karen had no idea what he was thinking.

It took about eight minutes. When Villanueva set aside the last vote, Karen stared, wide-eyed, at the page.

Babock nodded stolidly. “All right, ma’am. Shall we go make the announcement?”

“Yes.” Villanueva stood up.

Karen trailed Villanueva outside, where a sea of silent faces swung towards her when Villanueva opened the door. “Four percent of people voted for Frank Page’s expulsion from Logran,” said Villanueva, cutting straight to the chase. “Two percent abstained from the vote. Ninety four percent of people voted for him to stay,” said Villanueva. “The motion passes with the required majority. Thank you all for your attendance and participation.”

There was a wave of joyful shouts, so loud and sudden Karen’s head hurt. There were a few angry protests, here and there, but they were quickly extinguished. Yes. Madeleine had been _right_. This was what had to happen for the people who wanted Frank out. To see _this_. To see how outnumbered they were.

_Ninety four percent._

Karen felt her eyes prickle. Blindly, she reached behind her. She felt someone catch her hand, tangle his fingers with hers.

Frank’s voice was strange with shock. “They’re… they’re _cheering_. Karen, you’re a magician.”

“It’s not me,” Karen said. “It’s Madeleine. It’s Geoff. It’s Tanya and Helena and… it’s _Logran_ , Frank, it’s the _people_. They want you here; you belong here. You’re home.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With regret to anyone who was anticipating it, I announce that there was no natural way to have a Werner Herzog cameo in this story, and he does not appear.
> 
> I've done a bad but serviceable edit of Karen with short hair here if anyone's interested: etirabys.tumblr.com/post/142730963139

It was a hot, cloudless mid-August day when five people rode into Logran on horseback.

Karen was in her office, planning work rotations in preparation for next month’s harvest when someone came and knocked on her door. It was Ivan Messerli, who carried messages and ran odd errands for her nowadays. “Ma’am, we have visitors.”

She frowned in bewilderment. Logran didn’t have _visitors_. It had people passing through, it had people who wanted to stay, it had residents who made the short trip between Logran and its newly clear sister town whose equipment they were still sorting out. “From where?”

“They say they represent the Constellation, whatever that is,” said Ivan. “They came from the north road. On horses. And they have swords. Um. They say they’d be happy to wait, but I think you should go out now, ma’am, they’re starting to make people nervous…”

There were five of them, and four of them indeed had swords. But they were sheathed, and two of the people carrying them were children — a boy and a girl, who both looked thirteen or fourteen. They were smiling.

The one unarmed woman stepped forward when Karen approached. “Hello,” she said. Unlike most of the women in Logran, she had her hair worn long and loose. Long hair was a bad idea these days for several reasons — but surrounded by her guard, it made her look dangerous instead, like one of those poisonous insects with bright coloring. “My name is Regina Delamain. These are my associates, Gerard and Danielle Shasta —” One of the armed men and the young girl nodded at her. “— and Sungtae and Ibuki Delamain.”

“Welcome to Logran,” Karen said automatically, tracing the Asian boy’s features and noting briefly that he didn’t seem to be Regina’s son. Neither did Gerard or Danielle look alike; he looked somewhat Mediterranean, whereas the girl was a redhead. But of course there were plenty of unusual or reconstituted families, nowadays. “I was informed you come from the Constellation — may I make a guess that it’s the network of towns up in Pennsylvania? I heard of you a few months ago.”

Regina’s white teeth flashed. “How nice! Yes. We’ve been expanding south, trying to reach towns that may be isolated from a beneficial trade network that can provide food, antibiotics, farming tools, books, or engineering personnel. Our business is peaceful, and we will leave immediately if you are not interested.”

There was an interested murmur. People had stopped to watch the newcomers with their swords and horses. Karen looked from Regina’s glittering smile to the beaming if dusty faces of the two children, and felt her eyebrows rise. How… perfect. These people _really_ wanted an in. “Someone will be here to see to your horses shortly. Would you come into my office, Ms. Delamain?”

“Call me Regina.”

Karen motioned Ivan over. “Please get Amy or someone Amy recommends to take care of these horses. And if you could get someone else to get Frank real quick?”

“Ma’am,” he said promptly, and pelted off.

Five dusty people traipsed after Karen into her office, where she cleared away her immediate work and stacked it on the shelf. “I’m sorry there aren’t enough chairs,” she said. There were only two chairs. “I can bring in more —“

“This is perfectly fine,” Regina said, and sat down. The other four remained standing behind her — not even the children jostled for the remaining one. Karen, trying not to feel awkward and crowded, sat down at her usual place on the other side of the desk. “I know you’re a busy woman, Administrator Page, so I’ll try to keep my pitch under ten minutes.”

Regina pulled out a map from her satchel and unfolded it on Karen’s desk. “This is a population density map of the east half of the country before the pandemic,” she said. The map was hand-drawn, colored in with what looked like watercolor paint. But all of it was so precise that Karen had no doubt the gradations accurately represented the data. There was also a scattering of ink dots all over Pennsylvania, with a few spread out in the states surrounding it, such as Ohio and West Virginia. Regina tapped the cap of a pen half an inch south of the southernmost dot in West Virginia. “This is where Logran is. The blue dots are Constellation towns, which are communities that have agreed to a trading pact whose standards are set by the Constellation leadership, which resides in these dozen or so clustered communities here in south Pennsylvania.”

“Tell me more about the Constellation leadership.”

“People much like you, Administrator Page,” said Regina. “We have a handful of businesspeople, economists, and lawyers who got together and decided that the halt in the movement of resources across the country was the most dangerous threat facing America.”

Karen snorted. She couldn’t stop herself.

“It’s true,” said Regina. Her smile hadn’t faltered. “Let’s count the ways people have been dying since the pandemic. The best we can tell, perhaps a third succumbed to infection, most of them in cities. But that leaves about two hundred million people, Ms. Page, and we know for a fact that the majority of them didn’t survive the first year. _They_ were killed by hunger, by violence, by illness, by despair. And we know that more will die if they do not have access to food, technology, medicine, information. And even if they do not die, their communities will crumple and succumb to chaos and desperation.”

“I’m sorry.” Karen’s apology was genuine. “I understand this. It was the way you phrased it…”

Regina’s smile turned wry and real for a second. “I made the Constellation sound like a bureacracy. I understand your reservations; bureacracies did not handle the pandemic well. Moreover, your community survives by dint of its medics, its technicians, its farmers. I do not mean to undermine their importance. I myself lived with my hands also, before. But we need a handful of people who have the luck and talent to take the long view, and decide what it will take not just to survive, but to live.”

The way she spoke was a little weird, archaic, but it was growing on Karen. “Is the Constellation that?”

“It has achieved much,” said Regina. “Let me demonstrate —“

The door opened, and Frank entered the room. He was in work clothes, loose and comfortable, and his face was as dusty as the children’s. He looked around, gaze pausing on the swords, and then even longer on the faces of the two children. “Ma’am,” he said.

“These people come from the Constellation,” Karen said. “You remember, the network of towns up north we heard of.”

“And this must be the Punisher,” Regina said. Her teeth flashed again. “For once, the rumor mills grind truth. What an honor to meet you.”

Frank’s face closed on, and he nodded briefly. He came to stand behind Karen, mirroring the spread of swordsmen behind Regina. Karen quickly caught him up on the conversation.

“I was speaking of the way the Constellation benefits those who join it,” Regina said. “I saw on my way into the town that you are growing barley and corn — you are _very_ lucky. I know many communities who planted seeds without knowing store-bought fruits or vegetables would not germinate. Logran will make it through another winter, at least. But its farms are concentrated in a five mile radius. What happens if you hit a patch of bad weather next year, or the next? Or consider infection. If you’re using pesticides, you will run out. If they aren’t… it’s only a matter of time before bad luck and beetles get in your way. It would be good if you had allies, neighbors.”

“I get it,” Karen said shortly. These were not new worries to her.

Regina swept her hand out on the map. “Ohio, on the other hand, has many many acres of farmlands, and most of the surviving communities we’ve encounted there don’t lack for knowledge or equipment. None of the Ohio towns are going to run out of food anytime soon. But what they lack is electricity, and _labor_. In the nineteenth century, half of the nation’s workforce was in agriculture. Right before the pandemic, it was two percent. The sheer industrial power necessary to maintain America’s farmlands is unavailable — at the moment. I need you to understand, ma’am, that _there is land and food for everyone in this country._ Especially considering the farmlands were so sparsely populated, and can be easily reclaimed. But with the vast majority of those farmlands going unused, the food production going on in America right now isn’t enough to feed even half the people left alive in this country, which we estimate to be about fifteen to thirty million. It is essential we get these things up and running.”

Karen sat back for a moment, feeling a little shattered. It had been a while since she’d thought of… the _nation_. America was a big kind of concept. Running Logran was hectic enough. “All right. This is feels a little out of my scope, but it’s an admirable vision. How can Logran help you?”

“How can we help Logran?” said Regina returned. “The Constellation wants all of its members to thrive and be self-sufficient. Trade is important, but we must not be dependent on trade, otherwise we repeat our mistakes. What does Logran lack?”

A million things crowded to her lips. “We…”

Frank spoke for the first time. “You know, lady, I have a… wariness of people who make deals that sound too good to be true, and whose claims about themselves can’t be verified. For all I know, you guys are a couple of raiders who want an in to Logran by pretending to represent a network of trading towns… the temptation of civilization, see? Who’d say no to that? You come in and start talking straight off the bat about saving the country, about wanting what’s best for Logran. Now that sets off alarm bells in my head. No one’s that good, especially in the world we live in now, when it’s hard enough just to get by.”

Regina looked at Karen. Karen shrugged. “Do you have an answer to that?”

The ever-present smile disappeared from Regina’s face. It left her looking like a normal person, albeit tired and harangued. “ _I_ am not a good person, Mr. Castle —“

“Page,” Frank said. “I go by Page, now.”

“Mr. Page. I am a representative. I follow my orders. The pitch I’ve just given you has worked on the leadership of all the other towns I’ve been asked to visit, for the simple reason that it is true. It is not my truth, no. I do not personally care much about this town. But my employer does.”

There was a warning shift behind her. “Employers,” said one of the two swordsmen — Gerard Shasta.

“Employers,” Regina corrected without missing a beat. But Karen felt a frisson of excitement and fascination. A fracture in the organization — factions? “And I can prove easily to you that the Constellation exists and is what it appears to be — come visit us.”

A warbling laugh escaped her. “All the way to Pennsylvania? No.”

“We have a truck with a full tank of gas in Kinchelsea,” said Regina. She tapped at the map again, at the little dot half an inch to the north. “That’s a Constellation town. From there to the capital, Vesper, it is a three hour drive. Fewer than fifty miles separate Logran and Kinchelsea — that’s a day’s ride on a bike, if you know the right roads. Come to Kinchelsea, if you don’t believe us. You can continue up with us to Vesper, or you can turn back after confirming that Kinchelsea thrives, and hearing from its people about the Constellation. We’ll offer protection both ways of the trip.”

Karen turned to exchange a look with Frank. “Let me think about that one,” she said at last, after a silent argument she won. “In the meantime, you must be tired. Let me call someone to lead you to a place you can stay.”

“Delightful,” said Regina, the smiling mask falling over her face again.

:::::

“I don’t trust them,” Frank said a few seconds after the door closed behind the Constellation representatives. “Everything about them is designed to gain your trust. Their smiles. Their promises. Hell, even their _kids_.”

Especially their kids. Karen replied, “I know.”

Regina had left the beautiful painted map on the desk. She studied it, counting the dots. Fifty four, fifty five, fifty six. If each of these were the size of Logran, the Constellation already had over twenty thousand people. What could twenty thousand people do, working together? She swept her finger over the Midwest, feeling hollow. Regardless of Regina’s intentions, she was absolutely right about farmlands falling to waste, about food running out in the country. It was so tempting to believe that someone else had a plan, had the will, had the labor and technology, to take care of that problem. “But we can’t turn them away, if there’s a chance they mean what they say. I mean, god, what indication do we have that they’re lying? There’s no real red flag, beyond the fact that it’s too good to be true.”

Frank made an unwilling noise.

“They’re right about the pesticides, too,” Karen went on. “We’ll run out really soon.”

A husky padded in through the half-open door to the rest of the house, and came over to Karen to nose at her hands. Karen rubbed at his ears. He closed his eyes blissfully and laid his head on her lap. Her dogs, her house, her town, her people. And the world beyond it.

“Fifty miles,” she said. “That’s not too bad. We could be there and back in two days.”

Frank grimaced. “And if we run into the undead, or the living? And if it’s a trap?”

“It’s a pretty stupid trap, and they strike me as smarter than that.” Karen traced her finger up to blood-red New York on the density map. She looked up, and said quietly, “Do you think you could handle them, if it were?”

“They know who I am. They’d be ready.” Frank looked at wall for a second. “Yes.”

Karen nodded. “Harvest is in a few weeks. Then it’ll be winter. Any sort of trip should be made before it. Let’s… let’s do it.”

:::::

They set out three days later, five on horseback and six on bike. Four of Logran’s cleansers accompanied Frank and Karen, carrying guns and knives. They were nominally there as addition protection against the undead on the road, but the Constellation representatives knew perfectly well what they were for.

They left early in the morning, intending to break for a few hours when the day was at its hottest. It felt so _bizarre_ to set out on a road; Karen felt like she was leaving Logran for the first time in her life. She knew the town better than she’d known Hell’s Kitchen, or even her hometown in Vermont. She knew Logran’s streets and houses, its farms and graveyards, and the secrets of its people. The moment it disappeared from view, she felt stranded in the world.

They passed a handful of the undead that morning, but most were lurching around off the road, and the travelers passed by too swiftly for the zombies to even have time to get near them. The horsemen and the bikers didn’t move at the same pace; the road they were taking would slope up or down, and the horses kept a steady pace while the bikers slowed and sped up. But they never lost sight of each other, slowing down when they noticed a growing lag.

The Constellation horses were in the lead up ahead when they suddenly stopped, a little short eleven in the morning. The road was at an upslope steep enough that Karen was walking her bike up the last few hundred feet. “What is it?” she called ahead, when she saw the Constellation people dismount.

“The unrevived,” said Regina. “We took this road down and it was clear then, so these must be newly turned.”

When Karen reached the top of the hill, she saw a cluster of zombies, maybe forty or fifty of them, half a mile downhill. Her heart sank. They were crawling in and out of a crash between a bus and an RV. The road was bracketed by dense foliage at this point, and it didn’t seem possible to lead the horses or the bikes around the road, although people might manage. “Do we go around?”

“Oh no,” said Regina. “That would set us back too much. No. Danielle, Sungtae, if you would?”

The two children started pulling thick gloves, arm guards, some thick plastic wrap, and helmets from their saddlebags. “Hey, hey,” Frank said, sounding alarmed. “What’s — are you sending the kids? What’s wrong with you? We have seven armed adults!”

“This is good training for them,” Regina said. “They are in no danger. Our clothes are hard to bite through.”

“Stop it, lady,” Frank said, voice rising. Everyone from Logran had caught up by then, and was looking uneasy. “I knew there was something off about you — using kids to do your dirty work, I should have —“

The girl, Danielle, looked insulted. “I’m not a _kid_ ,” she said, drawing her sword. “I’ve been using this for seven years.”

Sungtae looked at her. “I got more of them than you last time.”

“Luck!” she stormed.

Regina said, “Please. You are guests of the Constellation. We are escorting you — let us show you how well we can do our jobs. If the children call for help at any point, you can go in.”

“Mother of God,” Frank said. “I won’t — hey!”

The children had pelted towards the wreck, a blur of black cloth and steel. Everyone from Logran surged in unison to follow, but Regina flung out a hand. “ _Watch_ ,” she said.

The undead had noticed them by that point, had started staggering uphill from the wreckage where they’d been feasting. Bodies were crawling out of broken windows, swarming up. Karen’s heart pounded; the undead never failed to disquiet her. A wreck like this should be handled by a full crew of cleansers. Frank vibrated with fury beside her, waiting for a word from her.

Karen didn’t give it. More than anything it was the way the three Constellation adults were standing besides their horses — relaxed, interested, looking down at Sungtae and Danielle, who had just met the first wave.

The children cut through them like butter. Steel flashed in the sun. Heads rolled on the asphalt, spurting stickily. Karen could hear excited yells as they flanked the horde like hounds. They were shouting numbers, keeping track.

“Holy fucking shit,” said a Logran cleanser behind Karen.

“Look at him shouting. He lacks discipline,” Ibuki said sadly. Unlike his — son? student? — he had an accent. “His training started so late.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” said Gerard Shasta. “We’ve all been derelict this year. I’m going to need to talk to that girl about her form. She’s gotten so used to unrevived opponents — not everyone she faces will be so slow.”

Karen could see nothing wrong with her form. The children were luring the rest of the zombies out of the wreckage, shouting and gesturing. Half of them undead were already dealt with. At this rate it would be over in three minutes.

And it was. After bending and peering into the vehicles to make sure there were none of them left, the children came jogging up the hill, peeling splattered plastic wrap off themselves and dropping it on the road.

“Twenty two,” Sungtae said to Ibuki.

“Twenty four,” Danielle said to Gerard, who made a pained gesture. “I told you to stop focusing on this silly competition. It’s not about numbers.”

“No bites, no cuts?” one of the Logran cleansers asked in concern.

“They didn’t even touch us,” Sungtae said proudly, pulling out a cloth from his saddlebag and wiping down his sword. “It’s the way of the —“

“Constellation,” said Regina, with emphasis. “The way of the Constellation.”

Frank looked as creeped out as Karen felt.

“Time to move on,” said Regina, mounting her horse. “The way is clear. Shall we?”

At lunch Frank tried to talk to the kids, but they clammed up to outsiders and did not give anything away. There was no more conversation until they reached Kinchelsea that afternoon, and by that point everyone was too exhausted to be curious about anything.

Kinchelsea had a perimeter like Logran’s — not a real fence, but a series of stakes hung with things that would make noise if bumped into: pans, bells, cups, keys. Convergent evolution, Karen thought. Right before they entered the town, Regina took Gerard’s sword, and bound up her hair. Karen observed with fascination as Gerard, previously laconic, took the lead and chatted his way into Kinchelsea, greeting the guards and relinquishing the horses.

Kinchelsea’s leader came out to greet them briefly. “Administrator Saunders,” Gerard said, smiling widely. “We’ll have to lean on your hospitality once again. May I introduce you to the administrator of Logran, Karen Page? Logran is a wonderful town about fifty miles to our south. We are trying to convince them to join the Constellation.”

“Ah!” said Saunders. He was a balding man in his fifties. “Welcome to Kinchelsea. You can, of course, return to the lodgings we provided last time, but I’m afraid it may be a little cramped for all of you…”

“I’m sure they’ll do fine,” said Gerard. “We are not staying very long, after all — Administrator Page simply wanted to see a Constellation town herself before deciding whether to throw in with us.”

Once in their lodgings, which was a house that was a cozy but not awful fit for eleven people, Karen asked Regina, “Do you and Gerard switch depending on the gender of the person you’re meeting with?”

“Yes,” said Regina. “We have one representative at a time who does most of the talking. The rest stand around as protection.”

But that meant Regina was probably as competent a fighter as Gerard, who was Danielle’s mentor, and Danielle was… incredible. “Who were you before all this happened?” Karen said lowly. “Where did you come from? You told me back in Logran you _lived with your hands_ — what does that mean? Were you military? Hired killers?”

But Regina just smiled, turned away from her, and would not say.

:::::

Kinchelsea was beautiful.

It was slightly larger than Logran, containing seven hundred people and about two hundred horses. It had been a horse town before the pandemic. Many of the horses had been eaten when food ran out, but in the past months they’d become much more valuable than that, as the Constellation had started selling them food in exchange for the horses. They were invaluable for traveling off-road, which was often necessary when large roads were congested with abandoned vehicles and the undead.

It was a flourishing town. Everyone Karen met the next day had something good to say about the Constellation. They brought everything: food, books, medicine, seeds for planting, and —

“Menstrual cups?” Karen said.

“We all ran out of tampons and pads last year,” said one woman she spoke to. “The Constellation brought a box of them. They’re _amazing_. Worth a horse, which is what I gave for mine. I’m told they’re trying to manufacture new ones up north, they're so in demand.”

And more importantly, Kinchelsea had power. The streets were flooded with light when the sun went down. Karen saw a glowing laptop for the first time in a year. “No internet, of course, but I can write out lesson plans and print ‘em out,” said a schoolteacher she talked to. “Pity we burned all our paper last winter, because we get them from the Constellation and they don’t sell cheap.”

In return for all this, Kinchelsea exported its horses, its unused tools, and the rights to use an old chemical plant in the area. Fifty of its people were working there, under the direction of engineers from the Constellation. Karen thought of a chemical engineer in Logran who was now a farmhand — not only would the Constellation would pay Logran to move him here so he could work, but he’d have a job he loved back.

In fact… there were a lot of people like that in Logran.

Karen sat down with Frank that night. He was eating a popsicle with almost comical deliberation. Ice cream was a novelty now. “You know…”

“I know what you’re about to say,” he said, turning to her and puffing out frigid cherry air at her. “You want to join.”

“‘It’s too good to be true’ isn’t an argument for anything and you know it.”

“Their kids are fucking creepy,” said Frank calmly. “Whoever’s heading this operation, they don’t care about their children. I don’t trust any organization that uses child soldiers.”

“So let’s go see,” said Karen. “Everyone in Kinchelsea gave me a detailed report of what they get from the Constellation and for how much, but no one knows anything about the people heading them. So let’s take up Regina on her offer. Let’s drive north with them, see for ourselves what their leadership is like. Whatever’s wrong with them, they really do want to _trade_. They’re not going to kill us or anything. The worst they can do is cut us out, and Frank… that might be bad enough.”

Frank took another slow suck from his popsicle. It was a little distracting. “You’re thinking about the electricity, huh?”

“Not just that. The pesticides we need. The medicine. I think we need a very compelling reason beyond suspicion to turn them down. So let’s go see if there is one. Our cleansers can stay in Kinchelsea while we make the trip there and back. If all goes well, we’ll be back within three days, tops.”

She held her breath, waiting for him to argue. But he just nodded, closing his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”

:::::

Compared to the arduous ride from Logran to Kinchelsea, the journey from Kinchelsea to Vesper — a distance four times greater — went by in an air-conditioned flash.

The roads were completely clear. They went unhindered at seventy miles an hour without seeing a speck of trouble. The Constellation really did keep their routes clear. Not a mean feat. Karen watched the countryside blur, feeling the increasing distance between Logran and herself like the uneasy pull of a string.

“Good to be in a car?” said Regina, watching her face.

“Yes,” she admitted. Her legs ached from walking around Kinchelsea all day and biking fifty miles before that. “Where do you get the gas?”

“We have a reservoir that was siphoned off every abandoned vehicle we could find, and gas stations,” said Regina. “It will not last us forever. But Kinchelsea is a little more out of the way than usual, and we knew we would travel further south this time, so we took the truck.”

“Does the Constellation have plans for when the gas runs out?”

“We have electric cars, of course. It’s a shame most factories are overseas now. But there is one in Ohio, and we’re funneling engineers there as fast as we can get them, trying to get them to rework it and produce more electric cars. It’s slow going, of course. The faster we expand, the better chance we have of finding personnel who can make it happen.”

Karen felt herself smile despite herself. “I can take a hint.”

Regina shrugged. “It’s my job to convince you.”

They stopped shortly after passing a road sign that said WELCOME TO PARTHAU. Karen squinted around in the noon sun. “Is this…”

“It’s three miles away from Vesper — it’s a core Constellation town,” Regina said. “It’s where we’ll return the car. I can make arrangements for you to speak to the Administrator of Parthau, who is better positioned to answer your questions than I. His office is fifteen minutes away — I can dip in and talk to his secretary before showing you where you’ll be staying.”

Parthau was mostly suburb, but many of the houses had been converted into markets, schools, offices… like Logran, its people were on bikes. Karen didn’t see any farms here.

They stopped in front of a the larger houses. For some reason it had a golf cart sitting in the front yard. Gerard nodded to them. “Ibuki and I have someone to report to,” he said. “It was pleasant meeting you and visiting your town; I hope to do it again.”

The two men peeled off, the two children trailing behind them. Regina led Frank and Karen into the house. There was a frazzled-looking young man typing furiously. “Hello, Ms. Delamain,” he said to Regina. “Administrator Ramirez is in a meeting with the Constellator herself right now, but if it’s urgent, he can probably spare a few minutes during his lunch break — it’s coming up in fifteen minutes.”

“I don’t need to see him,” said Regina. “I’m just here to make an appointment. This is the administrator of Logran, a community in West Virginia we’re hoping to trade with. Her name is Karen Page; she wanted to speak to someone in the core about the Constellation. Can you squeeze her in for half an hour to an hour, sometime in the next few days?”

“I can try,” said the secretary. He was using the same kind of ergonomic keyboard Karen had once used in her job at Union Allied. A lifetime ago. “But he’s been handling all the people headed to Ohio this week, and it seems like everyone has a bone to pick with him about their housing. Um. How is four in the afternoon two days from now? Forty minutes, you’ll have to be here on the dot.”

“That’s fine,” said Karen.

Upstairs, a door creaked open and then shut. There were footsteps, and the sound of a man laughing.

“Oh, meeting ended early,” said the secretary. He nervously combed his hair with his fingers and stood up and faced the door, which opened half a minute later to admit a stooped, curly-haired man, and a heavily pregnant woman.

Karen stared.

The secretary bowed. “Hello, Constellator, Administrator. About to head out for lunch?”

“Not together, sadly,” said the man, beaming at the woman. “Are these people here for me?”

“Not immediately,” said Regina. “They’re visitors from out of the state who’ll be talking to you later this week. Constellator, Administrator, I’d like you to meet Karen and Frank Page, representatives of Logran — they’ve traveled a ways to come here. Administrator Page, this is the administrator of Parthau, Jorge Ramirez, and the governor of the Constellation, Elektra Natchios.”

 


	6. Chapter 6

Elektra Natchios glided forward, smiling. Like Regina Delamain, she wore her hair long. “Such a pleasure to meet you.” She had some ridiculously charming European accent. Karen took her hand automatically and shook it, unable to stop staring. She _knew_ this woman. She’d been on Matt’s bed, that night Karen had come to Matt’s apartment to talk about Frank’s trial. So many details from the life before had blurred for Karen, but she remembered this woman just for her dark, angular beauty.

The Constellator’s smile faltered as she noticed Karen’s expression. “Is something wrong, Ms. Page?”

“Not exactly,” Karen said, fumbling with etiquette, trying to find the right way to phrase… “I just — please. Is Matt alive?”

Shock flared on Natchios’s face. “Who are…” She tilted her head and stared for a few seconds. “Oh. Oh, you are the _secretary_!”

Ramirez was looking between them, bewildered. “I didn’t know you were acquainted, Constellator? Does Administrator Page know your husband?”

Natchios was smiling enormously now. Karen felt only shock: _husband_? “Jorge, I’m going to have to interrupt this. Matthew’s going to be ever so pleased to know you’re all right, I must take you to him immediately. What a surprise for him! Do you mind, Administrator Page?”

“Yes,” she stammered, looking at Frank, who was looking as floored as she did, but motioned for her to go. “I mean, that’s fine. Please.”

Natchios practically danced as she led Karen out of the house. Karen kept looking at her rounded stomach. That was _Matt’s_? Matt was _married_? He was going to have a _child_? Good god. “You should have seen him fuss when he finally checked his voicemail! This was after the city was blockaded, so by that time you were long gone. That was _very_ messy, we had to steal a chopper to get out of New York. I told him you’d gotten out faster than anyone else, so you were bound to be all right, but it didn’t stop him from _mourning_ so much…”

It was nice to know Matt cared. Natchios got into the golf cart outside Ramirez’s house. “It’s a bit of a luxury, but I’ve been told not to bike,” she said. “But it’s quick! We’ll be in Vesper in ten, fifteen minutes.”

They went off in the golf cart, which hummed to life and carried them down the road, whizzing past houses and people and finally carrying them into a long stretch of forested road. Karen sat back, shuffling her questions. But Natchios got in there first, turning her head and remarking, “So I heard the administrator of Logran married the Punisher — is that true? What’s he like?”

“Erm,” Karen said, and felt herself go a little pale when she realized that while Matt owed her some answers, she was going to have to explain a _lot_ to Matt. “We’re not married. And that was him back there, you can meet him yourself. He’ll probably try to bug Administrator Ramirez about trying to find the people who got the power plants up again.”

“Oh yes, all the electricians are in very high demand,” Natchios agreed. “They’re actually our biggest commodity. People want them to come over and give them back the power. There have been towns far out that wouldn’t give them back once we hired them out… we had to cut them out of the Constellation. Happily everyone speaks the language of trade, and we haven’t had much trouble since.”

What a beautifully phrased threat. It occurred to her that there was no way Natchios didn’t know that hadn't been Frank back there. “Tell me,” Karen said, matching Natchios for friendliness. “Did you invite me on this ride alone because you think I’m the weak link in the team, or because you think I’m its head?”

“Head,” Natchios said, not even batting a lash. “All the intelligence I have indicates that the Punisher defers to you. Besides, you _and_ he left Logran to visit the Constellation together, so you’re not afraid of power grabs while you’re gone even when your main muscle isn’t there. So I can infer you’re running a nice tight operation, and I’m negotiating with a stable central authority. My favorite kind.”

Karen stared ahead, grappling with hearing herself described that way. Then she rallied and said, “We came up all this way because we had questions about the Constellation — who was running it, why its negotiating team has child soldiers in it… I have to say, Ms. Natchios, I’m not less perturbed by knowing that Matt is involved. And I still don’t understand who _you_ are.” She wasn’t handling this very well, showing her confusion and giving Natchios the upper hand. But she couldn’t think of a better way to do it. She needed to know more, before she went and faced Matt for the first time since — since an eternity. Who was he now?

“Me?” Natchios’s voice was musical, too rich and charming. Like a dessert that was probably really bad for you. When Karen looked over, she was looking at the road ahead of her with a pensive, amused little smile. The hand that wasn’t on the wheel was draped over her rounded stomach. “I’m just a woman who wants to save the world she can reach.”

“Through… trade.” She remembered Regina’s spiel about starving towns and moving resources. _I do not personally care much about this town. But my employer does._ “How did you come to manage it?”

A peaceful shrug. “I was a diplomat’s daughter and a businesswoman. I was at the right time at the right place, with the right people. And I had Matt. Why don’t I let him answer your questions? It’s really him you want to hear this all from. I know you want to arm yourself with knowledge, but you don’t need to. He will not be meeting you as an adversary.”

“Oh,” Karen breathed, feeling like she’d been struck. Natchios didn't mince words. “All right. I see.”

The rest of the ride passed in silence. It was both the shortest and longest trip Karen had ever taken. The trees gave way to farms, which slowly gave way to houses again. The golf car puttered up gamely as the road started to slope up onto a hill dotted with residences. The people who had once lived in this town had been wealthy. The houses were large and beautiful, spaced widely.

They stopped in front of one of those houses, smaller than some of the others but equally beautiful, built from white stone and red brick and surrounded by tall beech trees. Natchios parked the golf cart in the driveway but did not get up immediately. She looked at Karen and said, “You seem to be an extraordinary person. I guess I should apologize to you, for ruining your image of Matthew, and your chances with him. I was very sick at the time and don’t remember it, but I’m told you came into his house last year when I was on his bed and assumed the worst.”

“Don’t apologize,” Karen said. “Matthew ruined my image of Matthew. Everything and everyone else was incidental. Besides, I’m with someone I’m… very happy with.”

Natchios’s teeth flashed in a blinding smile. “That is good, because I’m not _that_ sorry. Shall we?”

Karen was not used to seeing pregnant woman bounce, but this one could. Natchios went through the front door — it was unlocked — and sang out into the foyer, “Matthew, I have a surprise for you.”

Her voice rang through the house. To Karen, she said, “He’s most likely in the library. Let’s go up.”

Natchios was slower on the stairs than on level ground, and Karen matched pace with her. Slowing down on the steps really brought out the jelly-like sensation in her legs. Karen tried to tell herself it was from all the walking in Kinchelsea, but it was nerves. _Matt, alive. Matt, alive_. Her pulse was a drum in her ears.

“This way,” Natchios said, and veered left, towards an open door at the end of the hall. Karen heard the sound of someone talking. Not Matt’s voice — too deep, and accented, magnified and rolling in the magnificent marble corridor. “…problem with training them on the road, but they’ve become inseparable. The girl was Stick’s mentee when he passed, and Shuuto seems to have —“

“Use his birth name, please.” Karen was close enough now that the second man’s cadences were recognizable. She could feel her heart beating against her ribcage.

“Of course. Sungtae seems to have taken a competitive shine to her because of it. Gerard and I were wondering if you would allow them to spar on the road, they clearly wish to, and it would be very useful for their development…”

In the library, Gerard and Ibuki stood next to a desk stacked with binders and books. Gerard was flipping through a ledger with a frown on his face. Ibuki was the speaker, but he went respectfully silent when Natchios appeared at the doorway. The two men both looked mildly surprised when they saw Karen with her, but did not comment.

On the other side of the desk sat Matt, his hands folded over a cane, wearing a loose white shirt and jeans. He turned his head to the door when he heard them coming, gaze falling off to the side. Karen faltered at the threshold, heart pounding. She drank in the sight of his face — Matt, alive! — clean shaven, tired-looking but smiling, eyes crinkled up. He had such a kind smile. It had been so long since she’d seen it. It made her feel a little brokenhearted.

“Let’s pause for a moment, Ibuki. What’s up, Elektra?” he said, rising. “You have someone with you.”

“I thought you’d like to meet the woman who’s heading Logran,” said Natchios. “Remember, the town with the dogs we wanted for the barrier towns? She arrived here this morning with Regina, coming up from Kinchelsea.”

“Yes, of course,” Matt said, looking a little confused at the enthusiasm in his wife’s voice. “A pleasure to meet you, Administrator…”

“Hi, Matt,” Karen croaked, finally getting words out.

Shock rippled across his face, dissolving his polite smile. “My god. _Karen_? Is that you? Where did you — how did you —“

“A lot of stuff has happened,” Karen said weakly. All her nervousness about explaining Frank to him rushed back to her. “I landed in West Virginia, and I’ve been… a lot of stuff has happened.”

“Mother of God, I thought you were dead,” Matt said, flinging himself across the room. “I hoped — but I didn’t —“ He stopped a few feet short of Karen, suddenly looked very nervous. “Can I… can I hug you, Karen?”

“Hell _yes_ ,” she said immediately, closing the last few feet.

Natchios was watching them, grinning. No insecurities or reservations, Karen saw with relief. “Shall I clear your schedule for the afternoon, Matthew, while you catch up?”

“Yes. Yes. Thank you, Elektra.” Matt’s voice was low, almost stuttery with emotion. They withdrew from each other — Ibuki and Gerard were quietly exiting the room. Karen looked at Matt for a long minute, and he swept a finger over her wrist. Reading her wild pulse, perhaps his version of staring back.

“Is there anyplace in this empire of yours where we can get a drink?” Karen said at last.

:::::

There was a bar in Vesper, which meant that as far as Karen was concerned, the Constellation was the peak of human civilization just then in America. There was beer brewed in the Constellation itself, but there was also liquor bottled from before the pandemic, which was some of the most valuable stuff in the area. Matt ordered a bottle of wine. Aside from the thirty dollar Zinfandel costing two hundred dollars, it felt almost… normal. Like the dozens of other times she'd gone to a bar with Matt. The illusion was upheld by the fact that the street outside the bar was well-maintained and clean. They could have been taking a break after a big case.

Karen asked the hardest question first. “Do you know where Foggy is?”

Matt shook his head grimly. “I lost touch with him when he left the city. He got on a bus headed to his parents’ town, but he never made it there. But I know many of those buses headed to emergency camps if they found the roads blocked, and a few of those camps were quite good, well-prepared, thriving right now. There are certainly more of them that I haven’t personally visited, and he may be in one of those.”

“I warned him.” Karen’s voice was heavy with grief. “Like I warned you. He tried to get in touch with you, but couldn’t find you. Where _were_ you, Matt?”

“Underground for a good two weeks,” Matt said. “Literally underground. It was a nasty surprise when I found my way back out and found it crawling with… you know. I was looking for a friend of mine —“ He caught himself, realizing he didn’t have to lie anymore. Karen knew what that felt like. “I was looking for Elektra. Um. It’s a long story, but she died and someone exhumed her body within two days. I had good reason to think they were doing something really nasty with her body, so I tracked them down.”

Karen wrinkled her nose. “She came back to _life_?”

“The details aren’t too important,” Matt said hastily, mistaking her tone for disbelief. “The thing is, it took a while to find her and get her out. She was the product of an incredibly tricky and complicated revival, and once I figured out what they were doing, I didn’t… I didn’t actually stop them. I stepped in and told them I was her lover and if she came alive I’d serve her with them. And they believed me.”

“That was a lie, right?” Karen said after a pause.

“Of course it was a lie. I’ll never serve Elektra. She’s kind of an asshole.” Matt said this affectionately. And then more somberly, he said, “We dated in college and then lost contact. Then she turned up again, and — Karen, not that it matters at this point, but I wasn’t sleeping with her when I was seeing you. She got stabbed while helping me for my… night job. She was recovering at my place.”

“It does matter,” Karen said. “Because you’re still my friend, and I care if my friends are cheaters.”

“Okay. Fair enough." Matt fiddled with his drink and continued with his story. “So, um. Elektra came back, I swore an oath to her with everyone else because there were literally a hundred of these incredibly dangerous, well trained people looking at her like she was the Second Coming. And they were really stirred up about something, except I didn't speak their language and didn’t realize what was going on aboveground. They wanted to take Elektra to safety, and she wanted me with her, and we ascended with a bristling guard of swordsmen…”

His laugh was self-conscious. “I was really worried, you know, about what was going to happen. You wouldn’t see these guys on the street and think they were just going for a walk in the park. I was afraid we'd get stopped when we went aboveground, and get arrested or something. And then we actually got there and it was a… a _sea_ of the undead. God, Karen, there are so many damn people in New York. I wouldn’t have stood a chance if the swordsmen hadn’t hacked through most of them and taken Elektra to safety. I lived just because I was with her. The majority of the guard died or got infected on the way, and we managed to make it a few blocks down to a building where there was a helicopter — air was the only route we were going to make it out.”

Matt groaned a little. “And then we had to fight our way _up_ the building, and… let’s not. Uh, the part where it gets complicated is that there’s this _other_ cult that exists in opposition to the one that worships Elektra, and they were waiting for us, because they believe that there’s a much worse end of the world that’s going to happen if they let Elektra’s people win. They’re a really dedicated group, let me tell you that. Centuries old. They were waiting for us and they had their own helicopters. There were about twenty or twenty five of Elektra’s cult left facing down forty of the Chaste, that’s my cult —“

“Your cult.”

“They don’t worship me, I wasn't anything to them, but one of them raised me for a while, taught me how to fight.” Matt took a long sip of his wine. “Taught me how to use my hearing and sense of smell to fight. Wow, it feels really cathartic to tell you all this.”

It felt a lot less cathartic than Karen had imagined to be listening to it. Matt’s truths weren’t simple or digestible. “So, you were at the rooftop…”

“Everyone ready to mow everyone else down,” Matt said. “No one seemed to care about the damn  _zombies_. Uh… I couldn’t help but notice there were helicopters for everyone, so I kind of asked Elektra if she was game for making a run for one of them and taking off with me. That was a pretty big risk, because I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to her alone and didn’t know if she’d thrown in with her cult or was just pretending to be one of them so she could get out alive, like me. But I figured I was dead anyway if we didn’t get out. And Elektra —“ There was a big silly grin on Matt’s face. “She took my hand, told her people to charge, and in the confusion kind of bent down and sprinted for a chopper. It was also night at that point and we managed to lose everyone for about a minute, which was all we needed to get into the nearest one and get it up in the air — she has a license.”

“Jesus. How did you lose them, if they also had helicopters?”

“We didn’t,” said Matt. “We brought them with us. They’re here. They’re the military backbone of the Constellation.”

Karen felt like she’d been punched. “ _What_?”

“Right. So that didn’t happen immediately. We were in the chopper, I have no idea what’s going on, there’s so much noise and I’m… flying blind.” Matt grinned wryly. “Elektra told me we were being pursued and we probably couldn’t lose them, since our helicopters are all the same model. She flew and flew until we were nearly out of fuel, and we landed a mile away from a small town — she’d tried to guess the best area to go to, based off the light on the ground. We landed far away from any major cities, which was good. And then everyone else landed too, which was not so good.

“Elektra’s people were pretty furious, but at me, they thought I corrupted her. And my people were just ready to go at her. Anyway, Elektra tells her people to stand down, that she’s going to try and negotiate. The reason we think this is going to work is that my cult’s most senior member is the guy who trained me, and raised her as a kid. They’ve tried to kill each other a bit since then, but maybe there was a shot she’d convince him. But then they brought him out and it turned out he was dying. He’d gotten stabbed in the earlier flight and had been bleeding out for a while.

“He asked Elektra why she’d run away from the fight, why she’d gone with me. And she said —“ Matt swallowed. “She said, ‘Because I’m his, and he’s mine.’ She said it pretty defiantly; he didn’t like it the last time she tried to go with me. And Stick said, all right, Ellie. All right. I’m about to make a lot of people mad. And then he told the Chaste, his cult, that they were going to follow me now, that it was their best shot at stopping the end of the world. They weren’t happy about it, but he got the last word like he always does, because he died pretty quick.”

Karen looked away as Matt blinked rapidly for a few seconds. “We buried him and called a truce, but I think everyone was convinced they were going to start the fight back up in the morning; you could _hear_ them eyeballing each other. But the first thing we did in the morning was go out to the town to see if they had any food, and it turned out the town was such a mess that it was really much easier to… take over. Elektra realized that our groups got along much better if they were occupied with clearing zombies and maintaining order in the towns we occupied, so we went at did the same thing for the adjacent towns — just to keep the Hand and the Chaste from killing each other and then us. And that’s how the Constellation happened.”

“Ah,” Karen said faintly.

“And then, um, we got married to make sure they understood the alliance was for good,” Matt said, sounding parched. He finished off his glass of wine and poured himself another. “The Hand, and a lot of the Chaste, are Japanese or East Asian, because that’s where the groups originated. They put more stock in that than us irreverent New Yorkers. Elektra said we should probably have a kid for the same reason, to secure the Constellation. I mean, also, condoms were in serious demand and we'd run out when she suggested it. And I think she may actually want a kid, she says she can’t wait to see what kind of oddball karate baby our genes turn out. I don’t know which reason is the real one.”

“Matt,” Karen said. “I’m really, really glad you found someone as batshit as you are.”

“Different flavors of batshit, though,” Matt said, smiling. She smiled too. And while they were both smiling, Matt said like sliding in a knife: “Speaking of, tell me about Frank.”

Karen winced. “Um… well, we’re not married, for one thing.”

“But you are sleeping together.” Matt’s voice was so mild it almost sounded gentle. “Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m certainly not judging you for sleeping with someone with that much blood on their hands. But I am… concerned.”

“Frank’s a complicated person.”

“I’m aware. Please. Start at the beginning. How did you come to control Logran — you know there are rumors about the woman who leads Logran? There’s a report from a teenaged boy who made it to one of the southern Constellation towns who says he’s the only survivor of a massacre you ordered on his group last year, that you made him bury their bodies and let him go as a lesson. Those rumors made us wary to reach out to you; we don’t do business with towns like that.”

Karen’s eyes widened. “Jesus Christ. It didn’t happen like that at all!”

“I was hoping not,” Matt said. “It didn’t, ah… jive.”

Karen poured herself another glass as fortification. And then she launched into her story.

It ended up being twice as long as Matt’s. She had to start earlier than leaving New York — she began with breaking into Frank’s house. This was just as much about explaining Frank as a person as it was explaining her actions. She skipped Frank’s breakdown after killing the men who’d raided the inn, but told Matt about his request for Karen to adjudicate his use of lethal force. She talked about rebuilding Logran, becoming its leader almost by accident, about frantically allocating resources, labor, knowledge. (They spent almost half an hour on that tangent, discussing how they’d both managed common crises.) She told him about the marriage facade that became convenient to keep up; about Frank’s exposure as the Punisher; about the campaign to keep him in Logran.

And finally she spoke, haltingly, about falling in love with Frank in the wrong order, about touching the exposed nerves of his soul and building a home together before getting to really know him as a person. And she spoke about the confusion of being under pressure and then discovering a new kind of person under herself, rising up to meet the challenge.

By the time she was finished, the sun was low in the sky and people were starting to trickle into the bar, laughing and talking. Matt gazed off into space for a minute, and then said, “I hope this doesn’t sound condescending, but — Karen, I’m so proud of you. You’re extraordinary.”

Karen smiled at him, slightly drunk on wine, vastly drunk on being understood. “It’s not condescending.”

They left the bar. It was raining a little, and Karen was suddenly thrown back to that time, almost two years ago, when they’d done this — walked out into the rain — the first night she’d kissed Matt. She stole a look at him and saw that he was remembering too. There was a faint smile on his face, slightly self-mocking.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I could have tried so much harder to be a better friend. Pushed through my fear and my pride. I could have reached back out to you or Foggy at any point. I had months and months to do it. To email you, or phone you. Say, I’m sorry, I want us to work, can’t we try again? And the more time passed, the more impossible it seemed to ask. This second chance to be your friend again — it seems miraculous.”

“I did get pretty mad at you when you showed me the mask,” Karen said. “I can see why you didn’t call after that. And besides, I never contacted you either. Until the zombies, I mean. I’m glad… I’m really glad that wasn’t the end of us.”

They walked in companionable silence for a while. Matt strode on with perfect assurance without breaking pace, stepping over obstacles and turning around buildings. It was so odd to see him without his glasses, without pretense. He seemed taller than she remembered him. People called out respectful greetings to him as he passed, the same way the people in Logran did to Karen.

Even after Matt had told her about being the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, she’d been unable to reconcile the two men in her mind. As Matt had said, it didn’t jive. But looking at him now, just walking down the street with his hands in his pockets, absently projecting power — it was like looking at an optical illusion and finally understanding how it worked. The mild-mannered Columbia lawyer, the masked thump in the night, the mistreated child, the leader of men. Just different snapshots of a strange sculpture.

The Karen of two years ago would have shied away from that understanding. The Karen of now turned it over in her head and found it remarkably easy to accept.

It took the end of the world.

:::::

Elektra was talking animatedly to Frank when they returned to Karen’s lodgings in Parthau. It didn’t sound like trade stuff — when Karen and Matt settled in, she realized that Elektra was talking about _recovering America_. She had a map of it spread out on the table, and a napkin full of calculations. There were four armed men spread out around the room, roughly centered on Elektra. They looked up at Karen when she entered, but relaxed when Matt followed her in.

“Expansion in the south and southwest will happen much faster — the area of influence of the Constellation is as you see. We expect a faster-than-linear radius growth rate and therefore a polynomial area growth, as we find more and more communities that are already interconnected. Time is of essence; it’s been about a year since the pandemic, so some of the lesser-prepared communities are going to start to run out of resources. We _must_ get to them and connect them to the network of information and goods before they start failing.”

Frank grunted. “That’s altruistic of you.”

“Not entirely,” Elektra said unashamedly. “Some of those towns are sitting on resources they aren’t harnessing efficiently or don’t know how to use at all. There was one town out west that was sitting on a steel mill and hadn’t even tried to figure out how to work it. They’re now one of the wealthier communities of the Constellation; when we got there four months ago, they were starving.” She turned to Karen. “And now that you’re here, we can start talking directly about what Logran and the Constellation can offer each other…”

Karen had been nervous about not being able to answer questions about Logran’s resources or capacities, or not knowing when to haggle. But every question Elektra asked her about the town, its people — even the soil type of the surrounding area — Karen knew the answer. She’d worked its fields and guided its people and knew everything about anything important that went on there. Matt was wearing a slight pleased smile that Karen couldn’t decipher. When Elektra moved onto figures, he occasionally made gentle humming noises in his throats when Elektra named a price for a particular commodity to sell to Logran — and, with fond exasperation, she would name a lower figure. By the time they’d hashed out the major exchanges, Karen was pretty sure from her own intuition and Matt’s interference that she was getting a fair deal for everything.

A couple of people brought in dinner at one point: there was a spicy fish stew, warm bread, small cups with egg custard. Karen tried not to look too awed, but it was a lot of protein for one meal these days, at least in Logran.

Having concluded trade negotiations, the conversation grew more casual. Matt leaned into Frank’s part of the table and started talking shop with him in a low, friendly voice. They fell into a discussion about security concerns, Matt nodding when Frank told him about how they’d been using dogs in Logran. “A disappointingly low number of people have done that, and all isolated,” Matt was saying. “Logran’s the first place we’ve encountered where you’ve systematized it, and we’re very eager to send a team down to learn from you…”

Frank seemed to be enjoying the conversation — having been silent up until then, he was positively gregarious with Matt — but at a pause in his conversation, he tilted his head at Karen, reminding her of something. Karen looked at Elektra and said quietly, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about the children in the group that escorted us up to Parthau.”

“Sungtae and Danielle.”

“Frank and I have reservations,” Karen said carefully, “about using children like that…”

Elektra looked at her oddly. And then a smile spread on her face, almost pitying. “Did Matthew tell you anything about my childhood, or his?”

“A little,” said Karen. “More about his. I knew his father died when he was young, but today he told me about the man who mentored him.”

“Matthew is atypical,” said Elektra. “He was taken in when he was relatively old, and only because of his immense promise. Most of the children trained by the Chaste or the Hand are recruited young, as young as five or six. There are about twenty preteens or teenagers who made it out of New York with us from either group. All of them were given the choice to join one of the Constellation schools, or to learn some technical craft. All of them refused.”

“Because they were brainwashed,” Karen said quietly.

“Because this is what we are good at,” Elektra said. “Because this is where we are needed. Can you see either Sungtae or Danielle attending some tedious middle school, fidgeting in a seat full of other children their own age who don’t understand anything about them? In the world we live in right now, the Constellation’s children have more freedom and power than anyone else their age. If Danielle takes it in her head tomorrow to leave the Constellation and head out on the road to find her own way, she can do it. Few things could kill her easily. Can you say that of any normal person you know, even an adult?”

Karen folded her arms. “I’m sorry. This seems like a somewhat self-serving interpretation.”

“Then let me put it this way.” Elektra’s voice hardened. “The world is in terrible danger. I can and will use all the resources at my disposal to keep as many people alive as I can. I was once one of those children. They and I understand each other better than you ever will, and trust me when I tell you that they are content.”

“Will you be training more of them?”

Matt cut in gently. “Everyone in the Constellation core learns basic self defense skills. There is a recruitment center where some of the more talented ones can come in and sign up for additional training to clear new areas or travel further south or west, opening new trade routes. It is _very_ competitive — the job Sungtae and Danielle have bring money, status, freedom. So yes, Karen. We will be training more of them. But everyone who joins is doing so of their own volition, and there’s a cutoff at age fifteen. I wish Sungtae and Danielle had not been recruited and trained the way they were by the Chaste or the Hand, but we cannot change we they are now, anymore than Elektra and I can change ourselves.”

Frank grunted. “At least they aren’t dressing up in a devil costume and running around beating up petty thieves.”

Karen looked at him in surprise. Frank actually looked convinced by what Matt and Elektra were saying. But then of course — he himself had joined the military quite young. This might sound reasonable to him. He seemed to have taken to Elektra, and seemed to be warming to Matt in this context. So Karen dropped the issue, and the conversation moved on — to horror stories about management, to Elektra’s pregnancy, to funny stories about Matt in college. Someone came to take away their dishes and cutlery, and brought back in a couple of glasses and another large bottle of wine.

It was pitch dark outside when they finally started getting up, all drunk except for Elektra. Matt got up and said to Karen, “I’m assuming you have the third floor room here?”

Karen did. Matt said, “You and Frank should check out the roof view. I’m told the view is incredible.”

“Thanks, Matt.”

He took her hand. “You’re leaving tomorrow, and I won’t be able to come see you — I have an enormous backlog of work. But… but you will come visit? Sometimes, when you can?”

“Yes,” Karen said. “Yes, of course. With gifts for your karate superbaby.”

Matt’s smile was glorious, like the splitting of clouds to let in the sun. “Good night, Karen,” he said. He left to go join his wife at the door, flanked by her protection detail. They vanished into the dark outside, none of them bothering to make a sound.

:::::

Karen and Frank retired to their room, where he undressed her in the dark, his mouth traveling across her skin. At dinner, Elektra had winked at Karen and passed her a bag of condoms that would go for a couple hundred dollars these days. Then again, it wasn’t as if Elektra couldn’t afford it. Frank fucked her until Karen was incoherent with pleasure, muffling her moans against his neck because there were other guests in the house. Her knees shook when she got up for a glass of water after they were done. Frank watched her with his chin propped up on his hand, looking away innocently when she turned back to him.

“Some day,” she said, sitting back on the bed and running a hand up his body, from knee to chest.

“Pretty unbelievable,” Frank agreed. “You tell me. Is it him or her that’s running this thing?”

“Of course it’s her.”

“The management, yeah. She’s a dangerous woman. Sharp. Doesn’t miss a thing. But the whole crusade — the saving the country from starvation and all that — that sounds a lot like Red.”

“It does,” Karen said after thinking a moment. “Matt has… yeah. I’m not sure. They’re so in phase it’s hard to tell whose thoughts and purposes are whose, especially in a day. But I think she buys it. I talked to her when she was taking me to Matt, and she was kind of… aflame with purpose. I think they’re both people we can trust. People we can follow, even, if it comes to that.”

Frank nodded. “All right, then.”

That was it, she realized. He was officially on board. It brought something to the forefront of her mind — something that had been bothering her quietly for months, but had now just come to a head. “You know, there’s this thing that keeps on happening where people respect me or look scared of me, and it’s because of you. Word is that you do what I say, that I’ve… tamed you, or something. Matt and Elektra mentioned it separately. And it gives me some kind of authority, some kind of bargaining power. I’m not saying it doesn’t make things easier for me sometimes, but it’s scary too. And a little disturbing.”

“I _do_ do as you say,” said Frank. He stretched out on the bed like some powerful, lazy cat. “And they’re right to respect you. I’m not sorry for that.”

“But it’s a misconception. It’s not because I’m… a scary person.”

“No,” he said simply. “I don’t follow you because you’re powerful, I do it because you’re good. And that _does_ make you scary. They’re right to be afraid, even if they’re not afraid for the exact right reasons.”

Karen shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to, ma'am.”

Karen let it go. It was a good night, for lingering over good things. Frank peeled off the condom and dropped it into the trash can. Then they ventured out half-dressed onto the roof, where there was a hammock large enough to fit two people. They were high up enough that when they lay down they couldn’t see any of the lights from the rest of Parthau.

Matt had been right. The sky was magnificent, cloudless and drenched with summer starlight.

“One good thing about the end of the world,” Frank said muzzily, stretching out a hand to the light. “The view. It still looks so fake, though, like CGI... remember CGI?”

Then he fell asleep. He’d been zipping around Parthau all day, after all, while Karen had been sitting and talking to Matt. She curled a hand in his hair and let her mind wander over a number of unrelated things that formed a constellation of meaning for her. Finally understanding the whole of Matt; the breadth of Elektra’s ambitions and Logran’s inclusion in them; the new self that had emerged from the partially cracked shell of her old one; the warmth coming off the skin of the man sleeping beside her. Everything in the world had changed and she finally felt now that she understood where she stood in it, rather than paddling for survival or understanding or happiness.

How many people could say that?

Karen sat at the seat of the country’s resurrection, marveling at her good fortune, at having come into such a wealth of things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for everyone who's commented and kept me going. I'll be responding to a few people in an almost randomized way based on how much energy I have at the moment when I get the comment, but I appreciated every one.
> 
> Comics fans may be outraged by the ending re: the Hand and the Chaste. I’m going off of the little we’ve seen in the TV show. I have skimmed the Wikipedia explanation of the two organizations, but because the show itself has changed the Hand in introducing of the Black Sky, etc, I went on and decided to take liberties with the mythology. No doubt the negotiations and compromises Matt and Elektra had to make to appease both the Hand and the Chaste were more extensive than Matt explained to Karen. For instance, if the function of the Black Sky is to resurrect something really awful through that pit Elektra and Matt discovered in Manhattan, I doubt the Hand backed down easily and agreed to twiddle their thumbs and take over Pennsylvania. The show doesn’t say if the Hand worships the Black Sky, or if it worships a purpose that can be achieved through her*. So there were at least a few hidden, more ambiguous compromises made.
> 
> *The most convenient explanation is that the Hand is actually responsible for the zombie apocalypse. The Constellation’s people refer to the zombies at the unrevived — those who have been brought back, but kind of… wrong. It might be that a failed experiment with raising the dead lead to something really nasty & transmissible. In which case, when the Hand brings back Elektra to life, they may already be having doubts about the necromancy thing and might be more persuadable to dropping the whole thing.
> 
> On the other hand, I’m fascinated by the human element of the Hand. They have dozens of ninja. Where are they being recruited? It’s possible that the whole operation is familial, but it's more interesting to think that like Stick finding Matt, the Hand finds vulnerable, talented children and inculcates them. The thing is that once the Hand moves to America, where Japanese children may be in low supply just for immigrant population reasons, they might widen their search to the Asian-American population. (Because the comics canon Hand seems to be to imperialist Japan what Hydra is to Nazis, I find it easy to believe they balked at recruiting non-Asians.) This means that once Elektra and Matt change the purpose of the Hand and the Chaste and everyone unmasks themselves, it turns out that a lot of the Hand — esp. the children — are a mixed bag of mostly-East-Asians with new Japanese names. This is why Sungtae, the young ex-Hand kid, is referred by Ibuki as Shuuto in his brief exchange with Matt. To anyone who is familiar with WWII Japanese history, this is reminiscent of the forced renamings of Korean citizens under Japanese rule (sōshi kaimei).
> 
> This is not at all an important part of the story, which is mostly about Frank and Karen. But I didn’t see why the Hand, fictional as they are, should get to escape their political history when so many modern Western villains (such as in Star Wars or Captain America) are explicitly modeled on Nazis and made to reify the mistakes of Western racism. Besides, I think even this portrayal of the Hand is more generous to the Japanese than the ninja caricature they get on Daredevil.
> 
> I don’t think I could have lingered more on this interesting topic even if this fic were twice as long. Which I wish it were — I’ve just never completed a work longer than 35K, and I thought it was best not to push my luck. So this stuff was going to go in the notes anyway, no matter how lovingly I tried to press all this stuff into the actual text.
> 
> …despite all this I really want to emphasize I don’t mean anything too political about this story, especially since it crystallized around (1) a d/s kink, (2) a desire for more dogs, and (3) Elektra’s magnificent comeback and redemption, taking place mostly offscreen, its hints creeping up on you until blam! she’s right there and you realize Elektra wants to save the world, starting with America, and might even pull it off. The reason I felt comfortable with Elektra’s story taking place offscreen is that the practical details of her coming to power, learning to manage the survival of a group of people, and investing her life’s purpose in doing so, is essentially identical to Karen’s — just on a larger scale and with more starting power.
> 
> I've written/posted this story in 8 days, and it is very rough around the edges. I've had writer's block for about four years now, and have been deathly afraid this past week that anytime I was just going to run out of gas all at once. I've been pelting ahead without much editing or self-questioning for that reason. I intend to, if I can, come back June 2016 and tighten this whole thing up a lot + delete this last paragraph. If you are reading it now, I haven't gotten around to it, and apologize for its roughness/incompleteness.


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